Tooth, there it is! Tooth, there it is!

October 31, 2010. Hee Hee, I couldn't wait to write about this one. It all began back over the summer, when the neighbors and I were sitting in the driveway for Friday night black-out. That's our street's recent tradition of faking a power outage on Friday nights, so the kids will abandon their video games & come outside to play with each other. As I discussed my racing, my next door neighbor, who happens to be a dentist, asked casually, "So, how much would it take for you to dress up in a costume for the Marine Corps?" Hmmm, I had to think fast. There was no way I wanted to do that, so the stakes had to be high. "$1000 bucks," I replied. After all, I had milked $750 out of my girlfriends back in April for the pirate costume and that was only a half marathon. Well, the rest is history, and I had been officially charity-dared to make a fool of myself in front of 30,000 runners. No problem. At the beginning of this adventure, I vowed to myself that I would say yes if given the opportunity to raise money for autism. Kind of like the movie "Yes Man", or at least my vision of that movie, since Jim Carrey makes me uneasy and I've never actually watched it.

Next on my to-do list was finding a costume good enough to say, "Thanks for the giant donation. I love dentists." Even worse than my former ability to run is my ability to sew. It comes from my mom, who is also sewingly-challenged. We still rely on the previous generation for any fabric-related handy work, and I have been known to donate pants, just because the button fell off and I'm too lazy to drive them to the dry cleaners for a quick fix. How on earth was I going to engineer a tooth costume suitable for running marathons? I started searching on the web, only to be confronted with $1200 mascot costumes that looked like they weighed a ton and needed a fan ventilation system just for survival. Nope, this was going to have to be custom made. I approached my sorority sister, who runs a designer handbag company from Germany, to see if she could hook me up with a qualified seamstress. Turns out they did not have much experience with molar-wear, so I was still empty-handed. Then one day, a new ray of light turned up in my Google search engine: the Mr. Molar costume, new in 2010 from Costume Express. JACKPOT! No sewing required, and perfectly suited for running. I was so happy, I even splurged on the giant cartoon hands. Whew! Now the easy part...running the race.

My coach's instructions were to run an easy 30 min. jog the day before, and then stay off my feet for the rest of the day. Also, I should eat an early dinner, around 4 p.m. and then chill on eating for the rest of the evening. O.K., I'll just ride the Metro downtown, pick up my race packet, and head over to the hotel on Captiol Hill for an early dinner & rest. That will save me the physical & mental stress of driving through DC, which is notoriously impossible to navigate by car. 3 p.m. Saturday, after nearly losing my tooth costume when a gust of wind on the metro platform blew it towards an oncoming train, I spent the next 4 hours packed like a sardine battling thousands of commuters who were in town for the Jon Stewart rally. It was 4 grueling hours of standing-room only platforms, train delays, and packed metro cars. I barely made it to the race expo before closing, and dragged myself into my hotel at 7 p.m., exhausted, dehydrated, and hungry, since I never had the time or opportunity for dinner. It took me as long to get into DC as it was supposed to take to run the race the next day. Whew! I already felt like I needed to recover and I hadn't even run yet!

The next morning, I'm happy to say, went much more smoothly. Perfect weather, a race buddy to keep me company, and a tooth costume filled with GU gel. I was ready to run. I'm not saying I was ready for the trials of racing in a giant tooth. The pre-race port-a-potty was one of the most daunting experiences of my life, one I vow to never speak of again. There was also the challenge of squeezing into a crowded start corral without rudely bumping into too many other runners. Fortunately, not a lot of people make eye contact around here (it's a DC thing), so not that many people stared at me, and the ones who did were smiling and nicely asking me what the heck I was doing in that costume. As the starting gun went off, I tried to press the start button on my Garmin with my big floppy cartoon finger, but it was kind of tough. I was just going to have to rely on my timing chip to tell my coach how fast I ran today.

The race went by relatively uneventfully. I had rigged a floppy hand clip system to my costume for the water stops, so I could have my hands free for a moment to drink water and refuel. Of course, since this involved my sewing, the clip system malfunctioned and fell off, and I lost one of my floppy hands at the 4-mile water station. I frisbee-tossed the other hand into the crowd and carried on. All along the course runners commented, "Wow, it must be tough running in that costume," or "Oh no, I just got passed by the Molar, how depressing!" Many of them just laughed as I passed them, because on the bottom of the back of my costume, it said, "If you can read this...RUN FASTER!" Many of the spectators cheered me on, yelling "Go Miss Molar! Go Tooth Lady! Go Autism!" Two people thought I was a marshmallow, and one person though I was dressed like a pair of dice (??!!!). The rest of the 100,000 people watching were inspired by my effort and made a mental note to go home and support autism research financially because of the awesome dedication of autism parents like me...right? Well, that's what I kept telling myself. I also kept telling myself not to let on to all the people that this was my first marathon, and I actually didn't know if I was capable of handling the distance OR the costume.

Well, my legs started to get really tired by mile 20. This is right about the time the wind kicked up and demonstrated the lack of aerodynamic design built into my outfit. It was getting pretty hard to keep going. Before the race, one of my autism mommy friends advised me to "Run like the cure is at the finish." I just kept saying that over and over again, in between the mental swear words, ouches, and wimpering. When my legs really started to burn, I thought of my son's tummy http://www.callous-disregard.com, and wondered whether his pain had been worse than what I was feeling at that moment. How did he handle that discomfort for so many years, when I only had to deal with it for a few tough minutes? When none of those inspiring thoughts helped, I switched over to my final mantra, "You never have to wear this tooth costume again for the rest of your life." And that was the blissful thought that carried me happily across the finish line. Marine Corps Marathon = conquered. I AM A MARATHON RUNNER AT LAST!!!