Color Run 2012

Jade, Jenna, Robin

More and more these days, crazy events are popping up everywhere and I have to say the Color run can be categorized as one of these crazy events.  A month ago my daughter asked me to race the color run with her.  Well, you know me, I can’t pass up an opportunity to run with one of my kids, so I said sure I’m in.  Really I think she just asked because if she goes with me, I pay her entry fee.

So the problem was, this race fell on one of my long workout weekends and it was the last long weekend before my Ironman race, so I had to move some workouts around to fit it in. 

That meant I had to run 17 miles on Friday push my 100 mile bike out to Sunday to create a hole so I could do the color run on Saturday.  No problem though, other than I would have to run a short fast race the day after a long run, haha, as it turns out, it wasn’t that fast. 

  

I really didn’t know what the color run was, I knew that I would be running a 5k in downtown St Louis that benefited autism, and that I would be covered in paint along the way, but who knew it would be so much fun.

What could be more fun!

Jade, her friend Jenna and I arrived at the race venue along with a few thousands other people, I heard someone say there were 60,000 people running.  I don’t know if there were that many, but it sure felt like it.  

Standing on the starting line

We waited in line for the bathroom and grabbed bandanas from someone giving them away. The Johnny on the spots were out of toilet paper, but lucky for us the girl in line in front of us had some wet wipes and shared them.  Then we looked around at the vendor tents for a few minutes.  Oh and we found a pair of shoes for Jade’s boyfriend, Zach.  If you don’t know Zach, he is 6’8” and wears a size 18 shoe, so as soon as we saw it, we knew it was his size.

"Zach, I found your shoe"

We went over to line up, getting in what we thought was about the center of the pack.  The race started at 8 am, but we did not move,  pretty soon it was 8:30 and we still had not moved.  Since it was going to be a while I snapped a few pictures with my adventure cam while we waited to start.

Lets get this race started

The crowd was getting restless and people started throwing the paint packets that were in there race bags, I decided to throw mine too, but it went kind of wrong and I ended up coved in purple paint. 

A little paint never hurt anyone

Jade and I were wearing safety glasses (don't ask where I got them at) in hopes of keeping the paint out of our eyes. Jenna had on sunglasses, I kind of wish I had sunglasses because it was really a bright day out.  We couldn’t have asked for a nicer day to take a paint bath on. 

Jade in her stylish safety glasses

We finally started moving and at 8:50 am, we crossed the starting line, we could see people finishing across from us when we were just starting.  It was hard to run because there were so many people, so we tried to get to the outside to get around the crowd.   We made it to the first paint station, where volunteers squirted us with big bottles of powdered paint, every paint station along the way had a different color paint.  When you ran through, there was so much paint in the air that you could hardly breathe. 

Girls just want to have fun

There were so many people as we ran by a building with windows you could see the crowds of people in the glass.

Look closely at the windows you can see all the runners coming by!

I decided to run ahead of the girls and do some video, so people could see how cool the race was, you can see some of the different color stations on the video.

It seemed like no time and we were at the finish line. It took us 40 minutes which is slow for a 5K, but considering the crowd and how slow it forced us to run, I didn’t think that it was all that bad. 

Jade & Jenna at the Finishline

The race was really fun, but if I do it again in the future, I will plan on lining up at the front of the crowd, that way we can run faster and get more paint. I mean I don’t mind sharing paint, but I would rather it be with a few hundred friends, not a few thousand. 

Oh and on the way home we stopped at McDonald's, you should have seen everyone looking at us.  A lady asked if we were in an accident, I said yeah with a paint truck.