Thanks for sharing.

Williams, Megan

To be clear, I don't hate men. And I shave my legs. But lately, I have found myself increasingly annoyed by the fact that random men feel the need to interrupt my workouts to give me exercise advice.

Take this weekend, for example. Twenty miles into an eighty mile bike ride through Marin, I am racing the flats with my husband and training partner Karen. As I swoop by two guys, I nod and look down the road. Pedaling as hard as I can beneath a clear blue sky on a Saturday morning when most people are still snoozing, l ride the loop in the road and feel the freedom I used to feel as a kid when I launched my blue three speed Raleigh bike off our front steps and did wheelies on the hot summer asphalt.

A mile down the road, the uphill starts and my momentum stutters. My husband and Karen fade from sight. "Chug chug chug," my pedals creak as I try to turn my legs over. Karen and Augie are now two large bug-sized dots on the horizon, and my bike shudders like an old wooden roller coaster before the first big drop. "I think I can, I think I can," I intone, a metronome to my gears.

"Well, aren't you just like a triathlete!" a voice behind me pronounces.

It's the two guys I just passed.

"Racing the flats and dying on the hills," the other seconds.

"You're gonna need to learn how to control your bike course in the triathlon."

Too out of breath and flabbergasted to say anything, I continue to churn my way up the hill.

As I watch their backs fade into the distance in their matching pink Fikzit uniforms, it strikes me that this is purely a guy thing. No woman would do this. This is not to say that women don't think and say things that are just as bitchy and competitive, if not more so, than male comments. We just don't dispense training advice to strangers.

When we first met up with these guys on our ride, I had plenty of snark.

"Look how fast this new bike goes downhill," one bragged to the other, and to everyone else on the road beside him.

"Dude. If you're so friggin' fast, why am I trying to get around you?" I thought.

Sure, I had advice for him. Beginning with: "Ditch the matching pink uniforms, dork." To be followed by: "Dude, you'd go faster if you didn't ride the S-turns in loops so big you'd make my fourth grade script teacher proud."

And while you might argue that these two men are just jerks, anomalies in the male population, my experiences as a competitive female athlete say otherwise.

The Zit guys, as I have taken to referring to them lately, are only the latest in a long string of men who somehow seem to think I need sports advice. Apparently, when I am alone on my bike, in the pool, or running on the trails, I look like a damsel in distress.

First, there was the male Indoor Track Coach who walked over to where I was timing my high school team at the finish line.

"You do know, little lady, that eight times around the track is a mile here?"

"You do know that my team just beat yours in this relay?" I respond with a smile.

I'm not quite sure why men come up to me. I am not at all little. I am not particularly cute. And I am definitely not friendly looking.

Then there was the time I was doing situps in a gym.

"You know," says a guy who looks like a sausage in his spandex shorts, "You could get a better workout and stomach if you did those on the inverted board."

"Um, thanks," I look up again and wince. Not a nice view. "I'll have to try that some day."

"After I shoot you in the head," I think. Perhaps he doesn't know how to read. Or he will look at my Boston Marathon finisher's t-shirt and ask, "How long is THAT marathon?"

I don't believe that women are any less competitive than men. Many men, in fact, have told me that I am the most bossy and competitive person they have ever met. Be that as it may, when you add gender into the competitive equation, strange things happen. Almost any guy will puke up a lung to beat a girl, even if he knows she is a better athlete than he is. This became particularly clear to me one day when I had finished running a track workout with the high school boys I coached.

"I did pretty good today, huh, Coach?" Justin asked me. He was one of those kids who plodded along, getting better and growing into his body over four years, but never growing out of his need for adult affirmation.

"Dude," Ryan, a state finalist in the 800, interrupted him. "Coach beat you."

"So?"

"So, she has three strikes against her: she's white, she's middle aged, and she's a woman."

"Oh, right," Justin replied, duly chastised.

Perhaps the only way to think of these incidents is to see them as male hormone storms. A kind of PMS--Puny Male Syndrome. Maybe we, as women, need to simply ignore what comes out of a man's mouth at times. We need to cultivate their singular relationship with the remote. When they say these things, men are clearly "not themselves"; they are hysterical, overly emotional, feeling moody and vulnerable, and we should simply tune them out. Kind of like the day my freshmen boys were doing situps in the weight room.

"Lift your hips when you do this crunch," I point at Alex, one of my favorites. He is polite but full of fight, two things that do not normally go together in fourteen year old boys.

"Coach, I'm practicing the star stretch," he jokes, spread-eagled on the floor and looking up at the asbestos ceiling.

"Come on, Alex, pay attention. Lift your butt or the whole team does this again."

"Lifting your hips. Something coach is used to doing on a regular basis," he announces to the whole team.

"Ha ha," I cut through their laughter.

"Did you smoke crack today, Alex? Or did you just wake up and decide today is the day you want to be kicked off the team?"

A still silence descends.

"One more comment like that and you're out the door."

In retrospect, there doesn't seem to be too much difference between Alex and the Zit Boys. Maybe there is just a part of men that stays stunted at thirteen.

Unfortunately, it appears that a part of me, too, is stuck in the eighties because I cannot let the Zit Boy Incident roll off my back like an adult.

My experience at the New Jersey Marathon reveals that there is really only one acceptable response to these moments. At mile ten, the wind starts to blow and the rain turns horizontal. My friend Ana and I claw our way through the aid stations, our hands so cold we can't grab the water or open our GU to refuel. For the first ten miles of the race, a middle aged man drafts off of us, huffing and puffing his way to each mile marker.

"You know," he reaches out a hand to touch Ana's shoulder at mile eleven. "You really could run much faster if you lengthened your stride."

"Are you friggin' joking me?" I think. "What part of being half-way through a marathon sounds like a good time to reassess your running form? And by the way, YOUR fat ass is hanging on to US, buddy."

Ana smiles sweetly at him. We look at each other and drop a 6:30 mile into the middle of our race.

We finish fifth and sixth. A good half hour before our friend. But we make sure he sees our faces cheering for him at the finish line.

"Guess that whole lengthening your stride thing really works for you," I joke with Ana when we pick up our awards.

And that is the solution: Smile sweetly and then run like hell.

So maybe the next man will think twice before assuming a woman exercising alone needs help.

Tell the Zit Boys I'll be waiting for them at the finish line.