If you haven’t had some manner of bathroom mishap, are you even a runner?
From squatting on the side of the road, giving up precious seconds to stop for a bathroom break during a marathon, debating porta-potty line-cutting etiquette before a race, to giving in to nature’s call and simply emptying your bowels mid-stride, most runners are probably more familiar than they’d care to admit with what pushing your body to the limit can do to your guts.
So when sprinter Kendall Ellis admitted she was trapped in a porta-potty right before she ran her best time in the 400-metre semifinal at the U.S. track trials, other runners could likely sympathize.
“Also I got locked in the bathroom an hour before the race. [Shout out] to the kind sir who managed to get me out because I was in there crying and sweating,” Ellis wrote on X on Saturday, after achieving a time of 49.81 seconds in the semifinal, her first personal best in six years.
also i got locked in the bathroom an hour before the race. s/o to the kind sir who managed to get me out because i was in there crying and sweating
—@kendi_kendall
On Sunday, Ellis bettered her time by .35 seconds, winning the final, along with the national championship and the spot in the Olympics that comes with it.
In a video interview posted by track news site Citius Mag, Ellis explained the lock on the door got jammed and she was stuck in the porta-potty for about 10 minutes.
“I was just banging on the door shouting, like, ‘help me, help me,'” she said.
For some, it was a race fear unlocked, as many runners visit the porta-potties before heading to the starting line (or for marathon runners, sometimes during the race itself). In fact, it’s happened before — a trail runner in Hong Kong got trapped inside a smart toilet last year. Other runners have missed the starting gun after waiting in long lines for bathrooms.
“Every runner’s nightmare,” runner Sarah Stafford wrote on an Instagram post about Ellis’s incident by Citius Mag.
“This is an actual nightmare!” echoed Caryn Just, a self-described “hobby runner,” on the same post.
So… what’s the deal with the bathroom?
Running news sites and social media are full of tips, stories and posts from runners about managing the urge to purge their bowels and bladders. In some cases, athletes, like anyone might, simply want to visit a washroom before embarking on a race. But this can pose problems when it happens en masse and there aren’t enough toilets.
Just last month, the Toronto Marathon was criticized for its scarce availability of bathrooms. A writer for Running Magazine describing long lines for toilets in a nearby shopping mall, grocery store and restaurant with just minutes to go before the race started.
In April, GBH News described the logistical challenge of ensuring 1,400 porta-potties were stocked and ready for the Boston Marathon.
“It’s a lot of toilets,” Michelle Stratton, the New England sector account manager for United Site Services, told GBH News.
Then there’s the matter of the runner’s trots, also known as runner’s diarrhea or runner’s colitis, which Very Well Health describes as an inflammation of the colon caused by the intensity of workouts that can lead to some unpleasant symptoms.
“Gastrointestinal symptoms are reported in 20 to 50 per cent of endurance athletes, more commonly in females, and more often in runners,” notes a 2012 study.
As for Ellis, who was eventually freed from her porta-potty prison and then ran a personal best, it all worked out in the end. Some commenters have even joked that she should make getting stuck in a bathroom a new pre-race ritual.
“Crazy things happen right before something great is about to occur, so maybe I needed that to get all the nerves and adrenaline out,” Ellis said.
Source Agencies
