Don't pee in the wetsuit

See that? I did that. It's called river sledging. I've always described it as floating through river rapids on a fortified boogie board.

I only did it once with my brother in Basalt, Colorado. About thirty seconds in, I realized I never wanted to do it again. We were on class 3 rapids. The whole time. After talking about this experience with my brother last weekend, apparently there was also a five foot waterfall that I blocked from memory.

Cool, right?

So, because you're swimming in freezing cold mountain water, you have to wear a wetsuit. Not the same kind that you might wear scuba diving on vacation, that's a 3 mil suit. This was a 5 mil suit. SUPER THICK. So thick that the guides actually told us during our "river orientation" not to pee in the wetsuits.

Bashaa, who pees in a wetsuit? Goah. Not me. That's cra cra. <-- If you thought this, you either have never worn a wetsuit or you are lying. LYING! It's natural law that when you get in the water wearing a wet suit, you suddenly really have to pee. Yes, all of those rental wetsuits have been peed on. Every one.

I will just go ahead and tell you right now: I peed in that wetsuit.

What I didn't know was that because the 5 mil wetsuit was so thick, "water" couldn't pass through it as easily as it does in a 3 mil wetsuit. Apparently, there is a big difference between 3 and 5.

So the whole time I was doing this really scary thing, I'm thinking: is this water in my wetsuit, or pee? I bet it's pee. Mhaaaannnn, I really regret peeing in my wetsuit.

When we finish boogie boarding down those rapids, and were standing at the side of the river taking off those wetsuits, I was being very cautious, very slow, because I still wasn't sure if there was pee or water in my wetsuit, and I didn't want the guides to see. But one of them thought I was having trouble, walked up to me, grabbed my wetsuit by the shoulders and flung it down to my feet in one swift movement. (At the time, I thought this was creepy, but it's actually called "stripping a wetsuit" and the person that does it is a "stripper." It's a thing. Used in a sentence: At the triathlon I went to last weekend, there were two strippers at the stripping station when we got out of the lake.) (That's what she said.)

So anyway, we're standing there and this guy flings my wetsuit to my ankles and all this "water" spills out on him. I mean, I'm sure it wasn't ALL pee, it had to be mostly water, but there was pee in there too. And he looks up at me like he knows.

Yeah. That happened.