The color of fun

I ran one of the more unusual races I've ever run this morning -- The Color Run.The idea is, you run a 5K and at every kilometer, volunteers bomb you with dry paint. Well, it was actually dyed corn starch.
At the end of the race, your white shirt -- and anything else you happened to be wearing -- will be a riot of color.
My friend Nicole heard about this and we both signed up. The race sold out and there we were this morning with 10,000 of our closest friends getting color bombed.
Here we were at the start. Look how CLEAN we look!

Here we are waiting to start the race. Because there were 10,000 runners, the race organizers had the runners start in waves. To keep us all entertained, they threw a couple of beach balls into the crowd.

Nicole with the beach ball

Me with the beach ball

The race finally gets started in Piedmont Park in Atlanta.

At the start

The race course is around the park, mostly, and here we are at the first color bomb, which was yellow.

first kilometer was yellow

And there was this fellow, rather formally dressed, along the route.

Wearing your formal attire to a fun 5K

Just about at the Atlanta Botanical Garden, we got to the second kilometer color bomb, which was green.

Second kilometer color bomb green

I was starting to get pretty coated along this route. And keeping my camera, etc., under my T-shirt really didn't help. That corn starch powder was getting everywhere.

Third kilometer color bomb, pink!

 At the third kilometer, the color bomb was pink. On the loudspeakers was the song "I'm the Geek in Pink." This is where one volunteer coated my hair with the color dye, which, I'm sorry to say, has not washed out.

Getting more and more colorful

By now, Nicole and I have been separated for a few kilometers. I re-injured an old running injury last week and it is still bothering me, so I ended up walking a lot of this 5K. But honestly, it was very hard to run this race. This was not a race where you work to get a personal best. Too many people for that, and with all of the bottlenecks at the color stops, just impossible to run fast. Maybe since I couldn't run, that was the reason I found three pennies along the route! The pig got fed this week!

Fourth kilometer color bomb, purple!

At the finish, and final color bomb

 At the finish, we got our final dose of color, which is a packet we carried the whole way. Can you see the color dust on the left of this photo? People were throwing their color packets as they got to the finish. Mine was red.

At the finish, color me RED

I've completed the Color Run

Somewhat of a mess

How clean are we now?

 Nicole and I finally found one another at the end of the race. My car has colored dye in it, even though I brought towels  to sit on. I feel bad for those runners I talked to who forgot towels. Yikes.
I'm not sure I will run this messy race again next year, but I'm glad I did it this once.
After all, it was a very colorful run.

Run like a girl

This morning I ran the Atlanta Women's 5K, sponsored by the Atlanta Track Club.
It's the first year I've run this 5K, which starts and finishes in Candler Park in Atlanta's Druid Hills area.
Let me just stay from the outset, the Druid Hills area is aptly named. Darn there are a couple of steep hills on this course!
It was a lovely morning for a race and it was wonderful to see so many women out there pounding the pavement.

Well, sort of dark, but the race start

I didn't run my best time this morning, but I was still very satisfied with my performance. I kind of tweaked an old running injury, so I should be very happy with my time. I worried I had strained the muscle enough that I'd have to walk the last half of the race, but I did OK with a little walking and more running.
This race was the same morning as the Tour deCatur, which is really the race I had wanted to run with my friend Julie, but I might consider this race again next year. The really nice technical T-shirt alone was worth it!
My next race is The Color Run. I hope to have lots of pictures to post of that. I expect to end the race looking like a tie-dyed hippie!

Chasing down hunger

I ran the Hunger Run 5K for the first time Sunday afternoon in Atlanta.
The event, which also includes a 5K walk, starts and finishes at Turner Field in downtown Atlanta and raises money for various organizations that feed the hungry, including the Atlanta Community Food Bank.
It was a beautiful day for the event,which drew more than 10,000.
And although the course is very hilly, I was only 10 seconds slower than last week's 5K, so I was very pleased. I even found a dime and two pennies along the course, so the pig got fed this week.
Since the event staged at the "blue lot" of Turner Field, I got to step up to home plate.
The blue parking lot is where the old Fulton County Stadium stood, before Turner Field was built as the new home of the Atlanta Braves baseball team.
The developer kept the markings for the old field in the parking lot, so I could stand on home plate.

Standing on "home plate"

I could have run all the bases, but there were people all over the place and I would have likely run into fellow participants.
Yes, those are my new shoes. I got a little more dirt on them in their first 5K.
It was a wonderful race and race day. And I hope we have made a dent in ending hunger in metro Atlanta.

Mama's got a new pair of shoes

Flush from my speedy (for me) 5K on Saturday, I went over to Big Peach Running Co. in Decatur to buy a new pair of shoes.
My older pair were showing signs of wear on the heels, a sure sign it's time to replace the shoes.
When the rubber is rubbed off from the road, it's time!
Here is the end result.

My new Nike Air Pegasus shoes

These are Nike Air Pegasus, the second pair of these I have owned.
I used to be a Reebok runner, and always had trouble with Nike shoes fitting me right. They never hit my arches correctly.
Then about 10 years ago, either my feet shifted, or Nike redesigned their shoes and I've been a Nike runner ever since.
Just look at these shoes! So new! So white!
I took them out the next morning to get a little road dirt on them.
I can only hope that with these new Air Pegasus shoes, I can run like the wind and drop a few more seconds, dare I say minutes?, from my next 5K race. :)

Running with the [red] devils

Another good race day for me.
This morning it was the Red Devil Dash 5K that started at Druid Hills High School in Atlanta, home of the Red Devils.
Overnight in metro Atlanta, there were terrible storms and high winds. When I woke up this morning, it was to the sound of rain.
I was sure the 5K today would be a wet run.
But the rain trailed off and the race was actually quite nice. About 48 degrees at the start with only a light wind. Almost perfect running weather.
The course for this race was quite nice, too.
It ran through Lullwater Park near Emory University. It was the first time I'd ever been through that park and it is lovely. I had no idea such a nice area was so close to my house.
And the nicest part of all, I ran the race in 35:25, my best 5K time in about three years. What satisfaction to see my running times going down again, when for so long they were creeping up.
The race was also profitable. I found a penny at the start of the race and then another one as I walked back to my car.
I found two pennies on the Charles Harris Run route as well, so the pig has been fed a couple of times this past week.
I fully expect, based on today's experience, I'll run with the devils again next year.

It's been a while

I have been remiss in blogging for a couple of milestones.
First and foremost, I ran my best 10K time Feb. 25 at the Charles Harris Run for Leukemia 10K.
This race starts at Tucker High School in Tucker, Ga., and ends at what is now Druid Hills Middle School (I'll always call it Shamrock Middle School!) in Decatur, Ga.
It's a point-to-point race that ends about 2 miles from my house. What I really like about this race is 1) it's fairly flat and 2) because it is so close to my house, I invite my friends over for a pancake breakfast after the race.
This year, however, I was not really looking forward to the race.
I hadn't trained well for the 10K. I only ran one training run at 4 miles in the past two months. And I hadn't run that much at all during the week. Not good.
On top of that, my friends all had prior plans, so no one was coming over for breakfast afterward.
In essence, I was going to run this race on my own, and I didn't expect to run it all that well.
So imagine my surprise when I got close to the finish line and saw I was about to turn in my best 10K time in three years!
I bested last year's best 10K time (the Big Peach Sizzler on Labor Day 2011) by two minutes!
My Charles Harris time was satisfying for another reason.
This year's Charles Harris happened to fall on the same day as six years ago, when I had just been diagnosed with cancer.
I was diagnosed Feb. 22, 2006. It was a Wednesday. My breast surgeon called me on my cell phone at 9:30 pm.
There is NO good news when your doctor calls you at home at night. Trust me.
The next two to three days were spent crying, screaming, being fearful, and, most of all, sleepless.
I literally had not slept in two days when I decided to go ahead and run the Charles Harris 10K that year. I had already signed up for the race. And God love my friends who rallied around me and ran it with me.
That race was 45 degrees and POURING down rain. I don't mean a light drizzle. I mean something that felt like a monsoon. And Jessica, Erin and others ran it right there with me.
We had the pancake breakfast after that race, and I was grateful for the distraction.
Fast forward to 2012.
Feb. 22 fell on a Wednesday, and the Charles Harris fell on a Saturday, just as it did six years ago.
What a difference six years can make.
I won't say that I didn't think about where I was 2006, but really I felt how far I'd come.
During the race, I did think about my friend Danica.
Danica survived breast cancer, but all of the cancer treatment caused her to get leukemia. She died from her cancer treatment. She was a beautiful mother of three young children, one of whom I know was too young to remember her.
As I ran, I thought of her. I felt her presence. And I hope I honored her with my run and the money it raises for leukemia research.
It's been a while, my friends, but I'm starting to feel like I was before cancer. It has been a long road.
It's good to be back.