Monday, June 10, 2013

Color Me Rad 5K


When my mom mentioned she wanted to come out to visit I looked up to see if there were any races going on during her trip. We were pleasantly surprised to see a Color Me Rad 5K race the Saturday while she was here. My mom was actually talking about doing a Color Me Rad race in Toledo with my dad, my brother, and my brother’s girlfriend, later this fall, so she thought she’d check it out.

Ryan and I have done The Color Run in the past, so we knew the premise of these races. I would say that The Color Run that we participated in last year was the FUNNEST race I have done thus far.

Saturday morning my mom, Ryan, and I went down to San Diego. We left our place around 5:45am and got downtown around 6:20am or so. They had designated parking lots that you could park at, but they ranged from $10 to $15, so we thought we would try to find street parking. It wasn’t too busy downtown around that time, so finding street parking was pretty easy. We pre-paid the meter for about $.65, which gave us until about 8:30am to get back to the car.

Once we parked we walked down to Petco, where the race was starting. Of course we went down looking all white and clean (obviously the color stands out more if you wear white instead of another color – so we got decked out in our clean garb).



We were in the 7am wave, although I have to say, it didn’t seem like there was much organization on the wave starts. They mentioned that the City of San Diego required that everyone running would need to start by 7:45am, but other than having waves start every 5 minutes or so I didn’t notice anyone actually monitoring the time you started.


Unlike The Color Run that Ryan and I did last fall, the color stations  in this race were not spread out very evenly. I think the main reason was because they needed to have the color stations somewhere that they could spray off once everything was done, not sure on the streets of San Diego. The course was about 2 miles out around downtown and then about a mile within the Petco parking lots. I did like the course for The Color Run a little more (even though it was just around the parking lot of Qualcomm) because they spread out the color stations every 1K. The nice thing with that was it kept your mind off how far you were running. It was like you were just running from color station to color station and didn’t notice the distance much. For this race, since they were sort of ‘jammed’ in the last mile the first 2 miles seemed to drag on a bit.


They had the color stations within the parking lots, where the course did a lot of weaving and turning around.. There were 5 color stations – first was orange, then purple, then yellow, then green, then pink. We had a BLAST running through the color stations. We danced around a bit in the stations to make sure we really got COVERED.







Mom crossing the Finish Line BACKWARDS!
After the race there was a little after party where we did color throws (they gave us extra color packets and would count down so that everyone could throw their powder). Just in case we weren’t covered from the race, we made sure to get each other plastered with the color.









We had an AWESOME time at the race. Obviously it is not a serious race by any means… We actually tried to look up the official distance using Google Maps and aren’t even sure if the course was a full 5K or not. These are NOT the type of events that you should do if you are looking for a serious race. But man, this really helps to remind you of why you get involved in running in the first place. These types of events, at least for me, just revive the love for running.



I would DEFINITELY suggest that everyone signs up for one of these races if you have never done one before. No matter what your fitness level, I would say DO IT! There are people that run the whole thing and there are people that walk the whole thing. No judgment, just everyone out for a good time!!

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