Muddy Bikes and Dirty Coochies

It's a good thing I like mud because this happened during the race on Saturday:

In my opinion, the picture doesn't even do the situation justice. Why, you ask? Let me give you a few reasons.

• You can't smell me. That there mud was Minnesota River Bottoms mud, which I'm pretty sure is at least 50% poop. Once it's on your face, that's all you smell for hours. Once it's all over you, it's all anyone smells for hours. (Or days, as I later discovered.)

• You can't see the inside of my mouth, which was caked in mud that smelled like poop, which means I'm a bit worried about having contracted Giardia. 

• You can't see inside my shorts, which were so full of mud I felt like I was racing in a dirty diaper, which I basically was since the mud was mostly poop. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending how you look at it I guess) none of this was actually my own poop. Either way, I'm quite certain my coochie has never been that dirty before (hold your jokes, perverts) so I'm worried about contracting both Giardia and a UTI.

• You also can't see my bike, most specifically the brakes on my bike, which with 4 miles left to go in the race became so caked in mud they quit working completely. Of course I discovered this as I attempted to make the 180 degree turn to come back to the finish. As you can imagine, that turn didn't go all that well. Neither did any of the rest of them, for that matter. Turns out, with no brakes your only chance of stopping is to Flintstone it, which is kind of amusing the first two times you have to do it. Then you realize Fred Flintstone must've had knees and ankles of steel to pull that off.  Great, Giardia, UTI and arthritis.

• You can't tell from the photo that, for some reason, despite my fear of disease contraction, I choose to hang out with some cool people for the next 6 hours instead of going home to shower. (Don't worry, I did at least put dry clothes on, but trust me, those clothes were only clean for about 2 minutes once my dirty body [especially my coochie] touched them.) At some point during our discussion, we added the chance of ring worm and tetanus to my growing list of concerns.

• My ponytail is not visible in the photo.  Ever biked in the mud with ponytail hanging down your back? For those of you that haven't, I can assure you that more mud ends up here than anywhere else. If you leave it on there for 6 hours, the smell will settle in for days. I discovered this the hard way when Big E returned home the next day. By then, I'd already had a shower and a bath. As we sat together talking, he decided he should shower too because he could smell his stinky feet. Shortly after, when he was fresh and clean, he gave me a big, clean, nice smelling hug. At least I thought it smelled nice. It was at this point that he informed me that it wasn't his feet that smelled like dirty feet, but it was, in fact, my head. Right about then I added lice to my list of potential diseases.....and then I took another bath and vowed not to let him smell my coochie for a few days. 

Of course, it was all worth it for fun times in the mud, even if I do smell a little. (Let's just hope I don't get Giardia because then I'll really be stinky.)