Take a Selfie with a Honey Bucket, Win Your Own or $1,000 (Your Choice)
The end has no end.
I believe developing brand loyalty toward one’s preferred Pacific Northwest Port-a-Potty company is integral to the American spirit. The European portable toilet market, such that it is, hides in the shadows, hoping to quietly perform its duties. Many of the races I attended in Europe scarcely thought of installing banks of portable toilets at all. Yet Honey Bucket is, as they say, built different. Over the last month, I have come to truly respect their services and marketing aptitude. No one can resist talking about the enthralling promotion everyone sees while taking a giant pre- or post-race dump.
From a brief scan of Instagram, plenty of people try to win this promotion each month. Perhaps they treat it as a joke, but the cheap advertising that Honey Bucket receives is no joke. And they thrive, toilets stationed across the Western United States, always well-stocked with toilet paper.
I have spent too much time staring at the door of a Honey Bucket. I’ve started to dislike the phrase, just as the brain finds words strange after repeating them over and over. What does a “honey bucket” imply…where did this phrase come from? An internet search reveals it is a uniquely American conception, and largely contained to the Northwestern lexicon. Yet it’s not a well-known word: if anything, the company is better known than the phrase itself.
Yet I am present in the Honey Bucket. My world has condensed. If the rule I followed led me to the Honey Bucket, of what use was the rule?
A few days earlier, I awoke at 2 AM with a burning pain in my chest. For a moment, I thought I could be having a heart attack. It turned out to be an extremely painful bout of heartburn caused by eating too many Tostitos “Hint of Lime” chips and then lying horizontally.
I don’t know where the line between serious and unserious begins. Ever since Succession came out, it’s become fashionable to label individuals or institutions as unserious. It’s easy to recognize the Brooklyn Nets or RFK Jr. as unserious, but it’s far harder to see the fungal infection of unseriousness within those that we care about. The abstraction of fame, power, entertainment, and money brings unseriousness to the surface.
It goes without saying that all of this is socially constructed. I am not a moral relativist, but I can get behind “seriousness” relativism. One unserious task—spending $10,000 on Dogecoin, for example—can be serious to a crypto bro. Another very serious task—let’s say going to the London School of Economics for a Master’s Degree—can be unserious to a paleoconservative who loves raw milk. The truth is socially mediated.
In distance running, serious and unserious aren’t two sides of the same coin: they are inseparable. When Alberto Salazar won the 1982 Boston Marathon and was immediately taken to the hospital and pumped full of salt to make up for his lack of hydration, it was serious. When he overtrained and got so addicted to running that his body fell apart, it was unserious. When he was a great coach for Nike, he was serious. When he was banned for life, he was unserious. And yet he was Alberto Salazar the entire time, cursed and blessed to run among us.
I don’t think it’s possible to succeed in running without some degree of dualism. The viral clip of Sifan Hassan saying “What the hell am I thinking???!!” after winning the London Marathon illustrates the point well: it’s truly an absurd exercise, yet she’s also serious enough to, you know, win the London Marathon. The best and most fulfilled runners exist happily and unhappily in this space, enjoying and suffering through everything.
Serious and Unserious Honey Bucket Experiences
Ending up in the Honey Bucket at mile 22 of a downhill marathon that I signed up for solely to qualify for Boston, only to be not even close to breaking 3 hours, is a bit unserious. Some may even say that all of my hopeless vanity marathons on 45 miles per week are unserious. It could even be argued that taking a 3.5-week solo trip across the country while unemployed and using various short-term rentals/friends’ couches is unserious.
To be clear, I’m criticizing myself for the expectations mismatch rather than the plan. But this is a lifelong problem, and it hasn’t improved since my first marathon.
The Race Itself
The greatest thread in the history of running forums: is the downhill marathon legitimate or just a trick to get vain runners into Boston?
To explain, in order to get into the Boston Marathon, you need to run a qualifying time under the time cutoff (usually a few minutes under the time listed on the website). However, they do not care if you run the course on a net downhill from Mt. Everest to sea level, so many runners attempt to run a downhill marathon to get the time. This has singlehandedly propped up the economy of St. George, Utah, and has created a cottage industry of races in Snoqualmie, Washington.
A Reddit comment I read estimated that 8-10% of Boston Qualifying times come from these downhill races alone. There have been many calls to put a minimum vertical drop requirement, but Boston refuses to do so. Thus, hundreds of people fly out to Seattle to run a marathon on a -3,000 ft downhill course.
So, legitimate or vain? To be honest, it’s mostly the latter. The announcer with a megaphone starting the race certainly thought so.
“Are you even listening to what I’m saying or have you all done this before?” she wondered. Most of us were repeat customers, meaning we’d run a marathon and failed to get into Boston before.
“Is anyone running this as their first marathon?” 2-3 people raised their hands.
My favorite part of the downhill marathon course was the tunnel, a 2.2 mile (3.6km) rail tunnel through a hill. In the tunnel, existence felt fake. I didn’t bring a headlamp, so I used some echolocation and the headlamps in front of me to see anything. Except I could see the light at the end of the tunnel, not proverbial, just a light slowly drawing closer. I wish I could’ve stayed in the tunnel for the entire race, sensations are overrated.
The downhill began at the end of the tunnel, and it went very poorly for me. Running downhill is not slower than running on flat ground, as some people have tried to argue. It is, however, still bad for the legs. My hips were burning, I had huge blisters on my feet, and
But nothing was going well. I was behind qualifying pace at about 13 miles, then fell behind PR pace by mile 20. As I spent more time outside, my body started to deteriorate further. In the end, all I had was the Honey Bucket. My blisters and right hip made it impossible to run.
Does anyone have any idea know how crazy I am? Well, I finished eighth in a trail half marathon three weeks later, so clearly I don’t care too much.
The kid is back!!!!