Thursday the 25th October was the day Melissa posted a message to me on Facebook saying we should do a 5km fun run called the "Color Run" (I know Color should be spelt Colour but it's an American event). A Colour run means you run around a 5km course and roughly at every 1km mark a different colour is thrown on you. After the 5km you are covered with 4 different colours.
This event sounded like so much fun, but back in October I had managed a to walk 5km in 50 minutes. Not really the speed demon that I figured I needed to be to complete a fun run. But after wasting too much of this year and feeling I needed something to motivate me I signed up.
The first step was to register a team name.... well one night I was bored whilst waiting for a midnight meeting. So as you do at that time of the night I came up with some ripper suggestions including:
3. Colour Blind
4. "You had me at Yellow"
5. Dye Hard (or Dye hards)6. I see dyed people
7. The Walking Dyed
8. Princess's Dyed (Didn't really work cause I was in the team)
Mel decided to choose Colour Blind which in the end worked really well. In theory a team consisted of 4 people and you all paid $5 less if you registered as a team. Unfortunately we couldn't get a team of 4 people and our team only consisted of 3 people. Luckily we believe Colour Blind would be a common team name so we got away entering the event with only 3 people.
After that night quite a few weeks of training happened. I installed an app on my Samsung Galaxy Nexus (Android Phone) called Endomondo and I started tracking all my walks and runs. Since the race wasn't going to be timed I decided that my goal before the race was to run 5km in under 35 minutes. After a few weeks of training I reached that goal on Melbourne Cup day (Tuesday 6th November) by clocking 6.08km in 41m14s. That was helped by the lightning storm that was approaching whilst I was running.... don't they say "If you can out run a lightning storm you can outrun anything"?..... Ahhhh no sorry that was a dodge ball.
Sunday 25th November finally approached and the weather forecast wasn't great. It was going to be low 20's (degrees not farenheit) with a slight chance of rain. But cold weather wasn't going to get us down so after meeting at Mel's at 7:45 Gemma, Mel and I were on our way.
We got to Flemington racecourse after finding a pretty convenient carpark (thank you Tom) and walked to the back of the queue for the people waiting at the starting line. That queue was massive, we literally had to walk nearly a kilometer to reach the back of the line. The line then slowly inched forward as different waves of people were let free to run.
After lining up for over 30 minutes we finally reached the starting line. At the starting line music was playing and a guy was throwing free stuff into the crowd (Who loves free stuff?). It was a great atmosphere with everyone dancing and signing, either pumped for the start of the run or pumped for free stuff.
After a countdown of 10, 9.............. literally the guy only counted to 9 and stopped, we were off and running. After 200 meters I was wondering what the hell I was doing. I was a bit out of breathe and all I was thinking was 6 months ago I couldn't walk. I shouldn't be running yet, this is crazy.
But thankfully I had Gemma and Melissa there with me. Not really for moral support but mainly because I felt I couldn't be shown up by girls. So I pushed through the pain, just like Chuck Norris would if he was human. After what we thought was the first kilometer but felt a lot longer we got to the first Colour station.... BLUE.
Running through the blue station there were people spraying you with the Blue Colouring (which I think is a type of colouring and corn flour). It was so cool because suddenly all you could see was blue everywhere (random image below)
After the blue station we all met up and surveyed the damage. It seemed that Gemma had got hit worse than Mel and myself. Mainly because Gemma was infront and took the brunt of the damage.
From blue we kept running and went through more colour stations. At roughly the 3km mark we made a detour and started running on the racecourse. This was so cool, we were actually running on the grass where the Melbourne cup is run. Surprisingly the grass is really long and relative hard to run on.
We kept running on the track through 2 more colour stations and finally past the finish line. By the end we had a fair bit of colour over us but we weren't covered. Also it didn't feel like a 5km run but that could also be because during the colour stations we ran a bit slower to get a bit more covered.
After collecting our free water bottle and packet of colour (they give you a free packet of colour) we made our way to the dance area. The dance area had massive speakers, music playing and heaps of people. The DJ counted us all down and suddenly everyone has thrown the colour out of their packets into the sky. Out of nowhere I could no longer see Gemma and Mel standing next to me. All I could see was Colour, it was soooo cool.
And that was how I spent the morning of Sunday 25th November. I'm grateful that Mel told us about the event and even more grateful that her and Gemma ran with me (even though I have no doubt they could have kicked my ass if they wanted to).
This event sounded like so much fun, but back in October I had managed a to walk 5km in 50 minutes. Not really the speed demon that I figured I needed to be to complete a fun run. But after wasting too much of this year and feeling I needed something to motivate me I signed up.
The first step was to register a team name.... well one night I was bored whilst waiting for a midnight meeting. So as you do at that time of the night I came up with some ripper suggestions including:
1. Skittles
2. Double rainbow (OMG it's a double rainbow.... WOOOOO)3. Colour Blind
4. "You had me at Yellow"
5. Dye Hard (or Dye hards)6. I see dyed people
7. The Walking Dyed
8. Princess's Dyed (Didn't really work cause I was in the team)
Mel decided to choose Colour Blind which in the end worked really well. In theory a team consisted of 4 people and you all paid $5 less if you registered as a team. Unfortunately we couldn't get a team of 4 people and our team only consisted of 3 people. Luckily we believe Colour Blind would be a common team name so we got away entering the event with only 3 people.
After that night quite a few weeks of training happened. I installed an app on my Samsung Galaxy Nexus (Android Phone) called Endomondo and I started tracking all my walks and runs. Since the race wasn't going to be timed I decided that my goal before the race was to run 5km in under 35 minutes. After a few weeks of training I reached that goal on Melbourne Cup day (Tuesday 6th November) by clocking 6.08km in 41m14s. That was helped by the lightning storm that was approaching whilst I was running.... don't they say "If you can out run a lightning storm you can outrun anything"?..... Ahhhh no sorry that was a dodge ball.
Sunday 25th November finally approached and the weather forecast wasn't great. It was going to be low 20's (degrees not farenheit) with a slight chance of rain. But cold weather wasn't going to get us down so after meeting at Mel's at 7:45 Gemma, Mel and I were on our way.
We got to Flemington racecourse after finding a pretty convenient carpark (thank you Tom) and walked to the back of the queue for the people waiting at the starting line. That queue was massive, we literally had to walk nearly a kilometer to reach the back of the line. The line then slowly inched forward as different waves of people were let free to run.
After lining up for over 30 minutes we finally reached the starting line. At the starting line music was playing and a guy was throwing free stuff into the crowd (Who loves free stuff?). It was a great atmosphere with everyone dancing and signing, either pumped for the start of the run or pumped for free stuff.
After a countdown of 10, 9.............. literally the guy only counted to 9 and stopped, we were off and running. After 200 meters I was wondering what the hell I was doing. I was a bit out of breathe and all I was thinking was 6 months ago I couldn't walk. I shouldn't be running yet, this is crazy.
But thankfully I had Gemma and Melissa there with me. Not really for moral support but mainly because I felt I couldn't be shown up by girls. So I pushed through the pain, just like Chuck Norris would if he was human. After what we thought was the first kilometer but felt a lot longer we got to the first Colour station.... BLUE.
Running through the blue station there were people spraying you with the Blue Colouring (which I think is a type of colouring and corn flour). It was so cool because suddenly all you could see was blue everywhere (random image below)
After the blue station we all met up and surveyed the damage. It seemed that Gemma had got hit worse than Mel and myself. Mainly because Gemma was infront and took the brunt of the damage.
From blue we kept running and went through more colour stations. At roughly the 3km mark we made a detour and started running on the racecourse. This was so cool, we were actually running on the grass where the Melbourne cup is run. Surprisingly the grass is really long and relative hard to run on.
We kept running on the track through 2 more colour stations and finally past the finish line. By the end we had a fair bit of colour over us but we weren't covered. Also it didn't feel like a 5km run but that could also be because during the colour stations we ran a bit slower to get a bit more covered.
 |
| Mel and I at the finish line. 5km! Suck on that cancer! |
After collecting our free water bottle and packet of colour (they give you a free packet of colour) we made our way to the dance area. The dance area had massive speakers, music playing and heaps of people. The DJ counted us all down and suddenly everyone has thrown the colour out of their packets into the sky. Out of nowhere I could no longer see Gemma and Mel standing next to me. All I could see was Colour, it was soooo cool.
 |
| From the outside it looks like this |
 |
| From the inside it looks like this |
And that was how I spent the morning of Sunday 25th November. I'm grateful that Mel told us about the event and even more grateful that her and Gemma ran with me (even though I have no doubt they could have kicked my ass if they wanted to).
I can't wait until I can run the Happiest 5km on the planet next year.
So awesome! Great achievement mate, well done :)
ReplyDelete- Sam & Gumps