Olympic-bound sprinter trapped in toilet before race unlocks new bathroom fear in fellow runners

If you haven't had some manner of bathroom mishap, are you even a runner?

From squatting on the side of the road, giving up precious seconds to stop for a bathroom break during a marathon, debating porta-potty line-cutting etiquette before a race, to giving in to nature's call and simply emptying your bowels mid-stride, most runners are probably more familiar than they'd care to admit with what pushing your body to the limit can do to your guts.

So when sprinter Kendall Ellis admitted she was trapped in a porta-potty right before she ran her best time in the 400-metre semifinal at the U.S. track trials, other runners could likely sympathize.

"Also I got locked in the bathroom an hour before the race. [Shout out] to the kind sir who managed to get me out because I was in there crying and sweating," Ellis wrote on X on Saturday, after achieving a time of 49.81 seconds in the semifinal, her first personal best in six years.

also i got locked in the bathroom an hour before the race. s/o to the kind sir who managed to get me out because i was in there crying and sweating

On Sunday, Ellis bettered her time by .35 seconds, winning the final, along with the national championship and the spot in the Olympics that comes with it.

In a video interview posted by track news site Citius Mag, Ellis explained the lock on the door got jammed and she was stuck in the porta-potty for about 10 minutes.

"I was just banging on the door shouting, like, 'help me, help me,'" she said.

For some, it was a race fear unlocked, as many runners visit the porta-potties before heading to the starting line (or for marathon runners, sometimes during the race itself). In fact, it's happened before — a trail runner in Hong Kong got trapped inside a smart