Color Me Rad 5k

My friends, Dawn and Kaela, came to visit this weekend – my first overnight guests! You may remember Dawn from the Dirty Dash pictures I posted last September.

Right after that race, we started looking for other fun runs that we could do together and we set our eyes on the Color Me Rad 5k.

Color Me Rad is pretty similar to The Color Run, which we had originally intended to do together, but The Color Run was in Phoenix and this one was right here in Tucson, making it an easy decision!

We decided to be Team Totally Awesome, because, well…we’re totally awesome. 🙂

We each picked a color and based our outfit off of that. We bought felt iron-on letters from Michael’s to add to the back of our shirts, which turned into a big ol’ hassle. We didn’t see the “DO NOT IRON” tags on our shirts until about halfway through the letters. Oops.

We got our long-sleeved shirts from Target (just like with the mud run, the temperatures had been perfect until race day when they plummeted!) and the rest of our gear we bought from the race.

We had planned to try to stay together, but it was pretty crazy in the beginning and I kept losing Dawn and Kaela, so they ended up telling me to run ahead without them.

The first color bomb station was just a little ways into the race and I loved it! There were people lining a color “tunnel” and they all had powder that they were chucking at us, creating huge clouds of color!

Apparently, I was feeling very victorious that day, because there are a ton of pictures with my arms in the air. I don’t even care! I was having the best time! There were 5 color stations, each with a different color. Some were colored powder and some stations had canisters of colored water that they’d shoot at us. Every station, I’d run through and tell them to “Color Me Rad”! They did. 🙂

By the end of the race, I noticed that 90% of the color on me was on my left side. Unintentionally, I’d gone to the left side of the “tunnels” every time! Weird!

I had my phone in my hand the whole time, because I’d planned on trying to take pictures and video during color stations, but I was so into the race that I only took a few along the way.

This is my favorite picture of the day. If you look closely at the color powder shooting toward me, they look like little Matrix-style bullets! This was also taken just before the finish line, which was a huge victory moment for me.

This was the first race that I’d run the entire course. I’ve been doing a couch to 5k training program, but I’m still weeks away from the end, so I wasn’t expecting to run the whole race at all.

At first, I told myself that I’d been able to run 20 minutes in my training, so I could definitely do 20 minutes in the race without stopping. When I hit that point, I told myself I’d just keep going until the next color station. Then, I figured that I had to be getting close to the end, so I just had to keep going. There were about four points that I was sure it was going to be the end of the race just around the corner, and it definitely wasn’t! But, each time, I figured the next one would be, so I just kept going!

Near the end, there were two girls that had been near me most of the race that said, “We want to finish with you!” which I thought was just about the nicest thing ever and it gave me an extra boost to make it to the end…and I DID!

3.1 miles in 44 minutes. It’s slower than I ran last summer’s 5k, even though I’d walked part of that one, but I was also in a much different part of my training. I am way proud of myself for this one.

Huge. Victory.

I finished first and downed some water and waited until I spotted Dawn and Kaela. Then I ran back onto the course so that we could finish together, as a team.

It turned out, they had a pretty rough race. Kaela was not a fan of the 5k. Her feet were killing her and Dawn had even carried her on her shoulders for part of the race…but, they made it to the finish line alive!