I am not a
person who travels remotely well, and as a student-athlete who has to travel 3+
hours up to seven or eight times in a season, this is fairly unfortunate. I am road ugly (a term a friend once coined
that describes the ability to make two hours in the car look like ten). This was not always the case. Once upon a time, I was simply a mildly
creased young lady after a long drive in the car or a day at the airport. Then I went to school in Montana where in
order to get anywhere, the minimum drive is three hours and the only airports
in the state only fly to a select few other airports so to fly to meets even as
near as California required one to wake up at 3 a.m. and spend up to twelve
hours on flights and layovers in connecting airports. After one particularly turbulent flight (most
flights into Montana are turbulent as the planes you most typically fly in on
are prop planes meant for under fifty passengers that resemble the creations of
the Wright brothers) when I woke up in the middle of a drop and was immediately
convinced that the plane was going down and I was about to meet Jesus,
something snapped. It was like I was a
gremlin and someone had given me a corn dog at 12:01 a.m. I morphed from the simply unpleasant traveler
I was before into a goblin with aching joints, swollen legs, and a tendency to
tear up irrationally after more than five hours in a car. Seriously, I once started crying on a bus
because we drove past a gas station and I really had to pee. There was a bathroom on that bus literally
ten feet away from me. Once on the trip
to Texas for regionals, I only remembered to pack one of my compression calf
sleeves. We had a ten hour travel day
with a layover in Denver, and by the time we reached our hotel, the leg that I
chose to sacrifice to a sleeveless travel day had swelled comically to 25%
larger than the other. As a result of
this recently discovered road-ugliness, I have come up with a long list of
remedies that, when combined, manage to make the changes in personality and
appearance slightly less aggressive and alarming.
First of
all, if you’re an anxious sweater like myself, you’re going to want makeup
remover wipes and lots of them, and potentially some dry shampoo. These will help transform you from a greasy
monster to just a monster. Also, if you wear contacts, I would recommend
wearing your glasses until you get to your final destination so you can take
frequent naps and not worry about having your eyes feel like someone switched
your contact solution for gorilla glue.
Another
key for me is to plan out your outfit for travel and make it a little
fancy. Not over the top fancy because
you also have to be comfortable and have some way to sneak all of your compression
underneath it, but by consciously choosing to not just wear sweatpants and your
favorite tie-dyed cat t-shirt, you get a little mental boost. It’s also nice when you’re getting stares
from strangers and you have to wonder if it’s because you look like a walking
dumpster fire instead of knowing with absolute certainty that it’s because you
look like a walking dumpster fire.
Food is
also v important. For me, the biggest
challenge is always making an effort to pack healthy snacks in addition to the
ones that you know and love. In high
school, my friend Alli always used to tell me that no road trip is complete
without meat sticks and sugary snacks, and I guess that mentality stuck. It’s all fun and games until you’re six hours
into a bus ride having eaten nothing but those delightful elf cookies that
Keebler makes and chocolate milk that is thick with two c’s starting to get a
sugar migraine and that gross sticky feeling that refuses to go away. It’s safest to pack these snacks in advance
rather than telling yourself that you’ll buy them on the road because when you’re
staring down a bag of Hostess powdered donuts, it’s much harder to say no and
go for the pretzels and hummus instead than it would be if you just packed the
dang hummus in the first place. But do
be sure to pack trash food also. My
freshman year, when I was truly a road-ugly rookie, there was one memorable
trip to California in which I got a slight head cold before we left. It wasn’t enough to take me off the travel
roster, but it was enough to leave me congested and irritable the whole
weekend. I distinctly remember one of my
ears getting blocked off on the flight out, and not returning to normal for
almost a week, despite many attempts to clear it by my teammates, who poured
hydrogen peroxide into it every few minutes all day. One of my teammates, knowing how cranky
travel made me and having a full understanding of my love of treats had the
foresight to pack a bag of candy just for me, and after every tantrum-free
hour, she would give me a piece. It was
almost like she was classically conditioning me to be well-behaved and I loved
it.
Stop by
your local grocery store and pick up some Pedialyte as well. I seriously get borderline religious about
that stuff. You really want to hammer
hydration anyway, but the electrolytes it provides are kind of like a slap in
the face for your kidneys to wake up and get to work.
Finally,
compression is your best friend. This is
a basic that pretty much everyone preaches, but I can’t leave it out because
without compression my entire body blows up like a balloon in a truly grotesque
manner. I would not be capable of
functioning like a normal human being were it not for my calf sleeves and the
Normatec. My relationship with Normatec is incredibly unhealthy. I am obsessed with it. I think about it all the time, and I get upset when I don't get to see it every day. I get jealous with other people get to spend time with it and I don't.
So, as we welcome another cross country season, stay safe out there. Don't make any accidental grabs for the hand of the person sitting next to you on the plane because you had a dream it was crashing or drop a breakfast burrito on your lap in the terminal (not that I've ever done either of those things). Always make sure you pack both calf sleeves, and for the love of all things holy, never ever ever consume caffeine immediately before a flight. Peace and god bless.
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