If you're weirded out by the misuse of dental hygiene items, you might want to skip this post.

Pop quiz: What is this? ...Yes, yes, I KNOW it's the world's ugliest bathroom counter, but I'm asking about the thing ON the counter. What is it? (*Jeopardy music*) Some of you might have said "A floss insert that you snap into a little handle and use to floss your teeth." Under normal circumstances, you might be right. But runners do lots of gross (just Google "snot rockets"), insane (run marathons 4 weeks in a row), and weird (pee in the bushes) things every day. I guess I must be a real runner now, because this is possibly all three at once!

OK, here's my problem: Every time I run laps on a track, I lose count of how many laps I've done. It's like my IQ goes down 50 points and I can no longer count or do basic math. ("If my watch said 12:15 when I got on the track, and it said 26:45 when I left it, how long did I spend on the track? Umm...13:45?") So I needed a solution that would allow me to physically track the number of laps I've completed. First I thought about taking a piece of yarn and tying it around a finger and moving it every time I finished a lap, but I have no yarn. A nice elastic hairband would also work, but I have very short hair, so I don't own any hairbands. Strip of Velcro? Don't have one of those either. Thread's too thin. Moving my wedding band from finger to finger would likely result in butterfingers me dropping and losing it, plus it's too small for my thumb.

And then I came up with a totally gross, insane, and weird idea!
The flossie thingie is very light, slips on and off my fingers easily, and I can even get it on my thumb! (I suspect this solution will work only for tiny people with tiny hands like me.) So just like that, it was promoted from lowly flossie thingie to SUPER AWESOME RUNNER'S LAP COUNTER! It worked like a charm, too. I put it on my left pinky when I got on the (indoor) track, and when I finished the first lap, I moved it to my left ring finger. (My wedding band was confused and annoyed, but it just had to deal.) After the second lap, on to my middle finger it went, and it kept going one finger to the right for every lap. On this crazy track I was on, seven laps were equal to one mile, so when I finished the lap where the lap counter was on my right middle finger (Ha, mile! I just finished you! Deal with THAT!), I "reset" it by putting it back on my left pinky for the second and third miles. I did run-walk intervals today, running for 5 minutes and walking for 2. I was horrified that it took me 43:05 to finish 21 laps, but just now, I found a page that says the jogging lanes are actually SIX laps to a mile, not seven. I guess this means I ran closer to 3.5 miles. That's a 12:19 pace, acceptable for run-walking. Whew. For a while I thought my fitness had fallen off a cliff and I was going to be reduced to crawling my way through the half-marathon...