Eight Exciting Things: Number 2

The Color Run

Allow me to begin, as I so often do, with a Seinfeld reference.   In the Season 6 episode "The Race," Jerry shares a personal mantra that I so often want to use as my own:

"I choose not to run!"

See, I've just never been a natural runner.  But when Katie (a.k.a. G-Money), who is a runner, brought up the idea of participating in a 5K called The Color Run, it just seemed too unique an experience to pass up.

The basic premise of The Color Run is that, at each kilometer, you get sprayed with a powdered, cornstarch-based color, so that you are colorfully filthy by the end.  The same coloring substance is used at a Hindu religious festival, so I guess the Color Run is sort of the secular, athletic version of that.

You were encouraged to wear white, to maximize your colorfulness after the race.  Here's our team before the event:

L to R: Me, Katie's friend Catherine (called "Cabby"), Katie, and Katie's high school friend Heather

Now, although this was not a serious athletic event, I knew my performance in this 5K would have the ability to boost or wreck my confidence when it came to my upcoming triathlon.  So I tried my darndest to run as much as possible, as opposed to walking.  I ran about the first half, during which we were sprayed with blue and then green.  It helped to have other people there pushing me to keep going.  But then I had to walk a little, so I told everybody else to go ahead without me.  

I had gotten to the point in my training where I could recover pretty quickly with a brief walk, though, so I started up running again right after we got sprayed with orange.  I off-and-on ran between orange and yellow.  The yellow sprayers were particularly generous with the color.  

Then, before I knew it, I was done.  It felt so much easier than I thought it would!  That's because it was: It turned out that, according to a teammate's pedometer, the entire "5K" was only 2.3 miles, as opposed to the approximately 3.1 miles that a 5K is supposed to be.  Some people were actually complaining, as though a shortened run was a bad thing.  

Here's a photo of the team, post-run:

We were a little more colorful, but the true color mayhem came at the end, when everybody was instructed to throw a bag of color up in the air to create a "color cloud."

That picture is taken from afar.  Inside the color cloud, it is pretty crazy.  The cloud completely blocks out the sun.  You are totally filthy afterwards:

A guy with a leaf blower blows off some of your color, and then a shower gets some of it.  It took about two showers and a swim in the pool for all of my color to come off.  I bleached my clothes, but they're still a little streaked.  They're kind of a fun souvenir. 

As predicted, the Color Run ended up being a unique experience.  However, it ranked kind of poorly on what my stepdad calls the Fun-to-Hassle Ratio.  The hassles consumed about 24 hours of my life: Trekking way up to the north side of the city in an inconvenient area to pick up the packet the day before, getting up at the crack of dawn, an hour of train/walking each way to get to and from G-Money's house, another hour of looking like a complete crazy person on the train back to the suburbs, some serious clean-up efforts for myself and my clothing, and then a two-hour nap to compensate for having to get up at the crack of dawn.  All that for about an hour-long running/walking/color-throwing experience. 

BUT, I reflected on the fact that it was a much more exciting thing to do with one's time than sit around on the couch all morning.  And so sometimes you have to put in the hassle to have the fun.  Because someday there will be a time when I'm so old that the most exciting exercise effort I'll be capable of making is a walk around the block.  And when I'm taking that walk, it will be nice to reflect back on the wacky day when I ran around Chicago getting a bunch of color sprayed at me.