The Color Run 5k "Race Report"

Some of our Montana friends (Kambria and Skye) recently moved to the area (yay!) and they like to do "adventure" 5ks.  (I refrained from saying "gimmicky 5ks", but that's pretty much what it was.)  Will decided he was game and I knew I wouldn't be up for anything serious so soon after IMCDA, so we all decided to do it.

The selling point for Will was that it wasn't timed.  That's fine, it got him running, so its cool.

The "race" started and ended at Coors Field.  We were meeting another couple, and I really suck at melding groups of our friends who have very little in common.  Its just awkward and a bit awful.  *sigh*  So we all met at the start and got in the corral.  It wasn't so much of a corral as a chute where people of all abilities were lumped in together.  They had announcers which were pumping up the crowd and releasing waves of people.  So, not at all organized.

all clean - and awkward.  The temporary tattoo said "happy".  The joke was "happy DAMMIT"

Will and Kambria were sticking together, doing a run/walk thing.  I was thinking about hanging with James and Sarah, as our paces seemed similar.  But they released our wave and I was surrounded by herds of slow moving people and I just took off.  Oops.

Again, I suck at the group thing.

So I just decided to run hard and dodge a bazillion people.  Thus the quotation marks for "race".  They really need a runners wave and a walkers wave.  Walkers were supposed to stay to the right, but they only knew that if they read the online race packet.  Which meant there were herds of walkers.  And even more annoying were the runners who would inexplicably get in front of me and slow down.  So yeah, I was that asshole weaving my way through, in my knee-high hot pink compression socks and pigtails, grunting and taking the race much too seriously.

I'm glad I studied the map prior to the race - they were not kind to us.  The race course took us on a bunch of underpasses and overpasses, which mean steep crappy hills.  Its the "happiest race on the planet" with a bunch of hills.  Oof.  But at least I was expecting those hills.

I was running pretty fast at the start, a sub-9 min pace and I told myself to slow down because I still had 2.5 miles to go.  I pretty much spent my time dodging and running, only slowing down for the color zones.  These poor people working the color zones.....  they put most of the zones in underpasses and the color was this powder stuff that they'd "squirt" on you with large ketchup type bottles as you ran by.  So gobs of dust in the air, all trapped in that underpass for the volunteers to breathe.  After the blue zone I was spitting blue.  I imagine those volunteers were spitting color for days....

So that was pretty much it.  Running, dodging, getting hit by color 3 times.  I'm proud to say that I did run up all the hills. I pushed the finish and came in at 30:26 and had 3.2 miles on my Garmin.  A 9:30 ish pace, pretty solid given the dodging and slowing down for color zones.

Then I waited 10+ minutes for the rest of the crew.  Lots of walking, indeed.  But that's fine, they had fun and that's what mattered.

I'm not sure I'd do this again, because the "race" format was annoying.  But I suppose that's the point.  If Will wanted to do it again, I'd probably go.

The funniest part:  this was my first race since IMCDA and it was a year to the DAY for IM Boulder.

 
It took 2 showers and a shit ton of scrubbing to get that crap off of me.  Will still had blue in his beard a day later.  And we washed our shirts twice.  I'm a dummy and didn't wash my shoes. I went for a run at work, during lunch.  Made the mistake of touching my shoes and my face, and now my hands and face are blue.  The Color Run: the gift that keeps on giving!