I ran in two 5k’s this weekend, The Color Run and The Tulip Trot the Missouri Botanical Garden. Both were untimed races, which means you run them for fun and there is no pressure on obtaining a new PR. I totally needed some low pressure races, especially after training for a half where each mile I knew I had to do better to obtain that PR I so desperately needed. Here is a photo of me outside our house before we left for The Color Run and yes our neighbors have horses. 🙂
Here is a better photo of my race packet… the pink sunglasses my Mom got for me at Walgreens (she also got Brian a green pair). See that pink packet? It is full of powder DYE! Yes, I sooo whipped it out and made a pink mess of everyone in my path.
So, umm.. yeah, we left the house at 7:45 a.m. with a race time start of 9 a.m., and we thought we had missed the race! Yes, we saw the race start before our own very eyes! The traffic was pretty horrible for this race, we went in an entire circle following parking signs yet never saw the parking lot. We decided to park where we always do, the trusty ole Union Station parking lot. We also found out that they were letting people go in waves, so we actually didn’t start running until closer to 9:30 a.m.
Getting in line to race… love the view of the arch here!
Here I am before the race, nice and clean… White shirt. I made horrible mistake by leaving my hooded jacket on UNDER my shirt. I was freezing cold with the rain before the race, but once I started the race I was burning up. I really prefer short sleeves when running and I should have just brought a tossable shirt or something. Oh well! And, WHAT is with St. Louis weather? Will we ever see the sun again?!
The closer we got to the start line, the crazier it got with people pulling out dye packets. Brian forgot his in the car and now its sitting on the table in our house. We must hide it before the kids ask what it is. LOL.
My Mom found the perfect pair of sunglasses for Brian
AND, here I am after the race!!! Just call me Rainbow Bright!
We started the race and it was raining so I was a little nervous to run on the slick roads for the first half mile or so until I realized I wasn’t going to slip if I was careful. Its amazing, but out of all of the races I have done… I have never had to run in the rain before. The race was SO fun and honestly I forgot all about the rain once I let myself relax and enjoy the festivities. The Color Run has you run through several ‘color stations’, where they have several people standing with plastic pumpers (think of a plastic condiment container but MUCH bigger) and they pump it and cover you with the powdered color as you run past them. You only get one color through each color station and the first color we went through was blue… this is definitely not race you run for speed or to PR. I would say 70% of the crowd was walkers and a lot of them had kids or strollers. I would love to take my kids on this run, there were so many neat costumes (and all of them were white) and just everyone was in such an uplifiting mood. I was running and dropped my sunglasses and whenever I drop something while running, I leave it behind. Well, a lady was kind enough to stop and pick them up and run up to me to give them back. How kind of her! Now I can use them if I sign up for the St. Louis Color Run in September!
Is it just me, or does Brian look 9′ tall here?
At the end of the race, people just went crazy with their color packets. There were little clouds of color everywhere, so much fun!
If you don’t follow me yet on Instagram, follow me! I took a photo of my running pants on the way home (I wasn’t driving, don’t worry) and put it up on Instagram. I asked if I would ever get all those colors out of my new running pants and my friend Katie’s sister told me to wash it twice. She was right, after one wash there was still some color, but after two washes it was out. Yay for tips on how to get Color Wash dye out of clothes! (And, of course I washed it on the cold cycle.)
