Saturday, May 31, 2014

In which we pay $90 to have people throw dyed cornstarch at us....

Under the cloak of winter darkness, a friend (you know who you are)  and I, desperate to dream that spring might one day come, signed up to do Color Me Rad's Boston run. Basically we paid a bunch of money for the pleasure of being tie-dyed. 

Today was the day, and it is a day that will live in infamy.

We joined 5,000 people at a farm about 20 minutes from our house and traversed 3 miles of corn country while slowly turning into Easter eggs.

I have lots of thoughts about the experience. It was fairly disorganized and the two-lane road that leads to the farm was not equipped to welcome a few thousand cars. (read: two miles, one hour.) I think it's safe to say that by the time we parked and made our way to the start line, easily .75 miles from our parking space in the middle of a corn row, we were feeling a scoche frustrated. We headed straight for the starting line where they had disregarded the scheduled waves and were just sending groups of 50 people off every few minutes.

Maybe I should have read the fine print but I expected assaulted by blasts of colored powder every few feet. Yeah, nope. I think there were four, maybe five color stations along the 3 mile course. Halfway through Arden was less than pleased to find herself still relatively stark white. 

Exhibit A:


The course was unexpectedly hard. In my experience 5Ks tend to feature a lot of flat land with one or two hills for good measure. This was hill after hill. I didn't hate it - we do a lot of hills on our jaunts with the dogs - but it wasn't an easy course.

That said, it was gorgeous. Gorgeous day. Gorgeous farm. Even if it did kick my ass.



All complaining aside, I'm glad we crossed this off our bucket list. More photos of the day!

This photo feels very Maria Von Trapp, The Hills are Alive to me, no?


Arden was SUPER excited that I kept whipping out the camera to capture this experience. See?


Delighted to finally be out of the car and ready to get the show on the road:


Seriously. The fierceness that is our kid. Seriously.


Mortifying mother forced selfie FTW!


PINK (of note, asthmatics, wear a mask!)


PURPLE - this was right before the finish line.



Finisher

                                  

They had bags of 'color bombs' at the end - we each got one and she finished the job herself.





 In the end, we had fun. I wouldn't do a 5K like this again -- it's just too gimmicky -- but now we can say we've done it, right? Right.


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