No doubt you've read or been told that before you start any exercise program, you should see a physician. This is great advice, especially if your heart has spent the last decade or so pumping the equivalent of maple syrup. Now, we would never call a physician inadequate, but after seeing one, you might want to turn to us for real medical advice*. Because there are a lot of terrible things they don't tell you about exercise. Like ...

So you've decided to get back in shape. Congratulations! Your heart, your lungs and your long-suffering significant other thank you.

5 Running Makes You Poop Yourself

Congratulations -- you've decided to take up running! That'll get your ass in shape. So you lay your shoes and shorts by the bed, set the alarm to a time you've never seen on your clock before (there's a 5 A.M. now?) and prepare to embark on a journey of personal victory and a lifetime of rubbing your athletic prowess into the jerk faces of your seventh-grade gym class.



And while you're at it, stop hanging around with seventh-graders, you weirdo.

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And to your surprise, you actually do it. You take off onto the dark, empty streets. All is great until suddenly, when your body detects that you are at the farthest possible point from a toilet, you realize that hitting up Bert's Taco Palace last night as a celebratory kickoff to your new life may have been a less-than-optimal decision. Welcome to runner's diarrhea.

Running is one of the more jiggly sports. Lots of impact. And the vibrations of your feet pounding on the ground over and over again hit resonance with your gastrointestinal system, causing it to, ahem, wake up. It's running's own brown note. And when it hits, you'll enter a race with Satan himself to find any amount of privacy -- if not from your own shame, then to avoid being arrested -- lest you face "the muddy walk home."

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Just ask Paula Radcliffe.



This is Paula Radcliffe totally smoking some dude during a 10K while she is seven months pregnant.

Paula Radcliffe holds the world's record female marathon time at 2:15:25. And near the end of the 2005 world championship marathon, Paula straight ran herself into some problems: "I was losing time because I was having stomach cramps and I thought 'I just need to go and I'll be fine.' I didn't really want to resort to that in front of hundreds of thousands of people. Basically I needed to go. I started feeling it between 15 and 16 miles and probably carried on too long before stopping. I must have eaten too much beforehand."