I had never before heard about nipple chafing; actually I had never heard of armpit chafing or elbow chafing either. Thigh chafing, yes. I remember at a party in 7th grade a guy in my class, Agustin, got a deep dark bruise on his thighs from running too long in his wet bathing suit. “Want to feel it?” I remember he asked. I slapped him before realizing he was talking about the bruise.
You can probably imagine my surprise when at lunch, a day before my first half marathon, I heard one guy friend ask another what type of cream he used on his nipples. Nipples, had I heard that correctly? I listened intently as they shared tips with each other, like how you should pat your whole body dry before applying Vaseline and how it’s a good idea to coat your underarms and elbows too. ‘Do you wear underwear?’ I asked, and the conversation took a weird turn.
This conversation should have made our lunch neighbors uncomfortable, but here, only a block away from the Rio de Janeiro Marathon sign-up tent, it blended in with similar chatter close by. I was the only one cringing; not so much at the prospect of lathering myself in petroleum jelly, but from the fact that this was the first I’d heard of the matter and I was scheduled to run 21km in less than 24 hours.
In the end, I made it through the race alive. At around kilometer 13 I started to feel my toes grow larger and at kilometer 19 my chest started to burn. After the finish line, after posing for a photo and gathering my backpack, I took off my shoes. Oozing blisters covered my pinky toes and my sports bra had chafed a semicircular line onto my upper chest. It burned. It really really burned. And all I could think was, why didn’t I have the Vaseline conversation with a girl?
É uma ruiva! 