One of the races that has been on my to do list for awhile is the Color Run.  Yesterday Kevin and I finally did a run very similar to it, the Color Flash 5K.  It was held in Sherwood Island State Park in Westport, Connecticut. The race route ran around the edge of the island which is bordered by Long Island Sound. Kevin and I wandered down to the shore and were pleasantly surprised to discover we had it to ourselves that morning.

 

The Color Flash 5K is run by Phoebe’s Phriends.  All proceeds from the Color Flash went to the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center for pediatric cancer research.

The draw of the color run is, well, color!  And a lot of it. Participants are given color dust (packets of colored cornstarch) to throw at whoever and however you want.

 

 

It resulted in colorful dust clouds.

 

As you may be able to tell from the pictures race day was gray and drizzled a bit, but the rain stopped before the race started.  I use the term race loosely because this is not a timed event and you want to go slow enough to be hit with lots of the color powder.  If you don’t come out looking like Rainbow Brite then you failed. Most of the participants, including Kevin and I, walked it. The high number of walkers could also be because the course was a bit slippery due to the rain having created some muddy patches and puddles.

 

There were around four or five food trucks, with some that offered to get you baked and buzzed.

 

Along with the race t-shirts the organizers handed out sunglasses. I was glad to see those as mine literally fell apart on the way to the race. You need the sunglasses to keep the powder from getting in your eyes. Kevin elected not to wear the very cool shades they were handing out and instead wore his own pair. The organizers warned his sunglasses could be ruined by the powder but he decided there was no shame in multicolored shades and went with it.

 

The race started underneath an arch of colorful balloons, with the runners/walkers being released in waves. It started at 10 am which is late for a race but it was cool enough outside that it didn’t present an issue and we were thankful for the extra time to sleep in.

 

Roughly every five minutes or so they’d lift the caution tape to let a wave go out. That must have been to make sure the volunteers at the color stations had time to reload with color powder to throw.

It was easy to avoid getting hit by much powder if you decided to go that route (but…why would you?), you just had to walk or run in the middle of the road to stay away from the volunteers that were on the sides with the color powder.  We of course wanted to get hit and came out looking like this.

The powder all easily washed off our clothes except for a few spots that had gotten particularly sweaty/rained on during the race.  Skin was a different matter, Kevin’s knee still has faint streaks of green. We put our phones in plastic bags to avoid the powder messing them up.  That resulted in some photos having a cloudy tint of the color most recently thrown at us since the lens was shooting through the dusty bag. See below photo that was taken while the phone was in the bag as compared with the clearer photos above taken when the phone was removed from the bag.

Kevin’s hair really was highlighted with pink though. That is courtesy of yours truly, not the pink tinted plastic bag. I used my color dust to color his hair.  He is such a good husband for letting me color his hair pink :).

After the race we went straight to Home Depot and then to a Mexican food place for lunch.  At Home Depot it really didn’t matter that Kevin looked like a box of crayolas had exploded on him since people walk in there splashed with paint and who knows what else all the time. The Mexican food place was not as busy as it usually is and so stares were few and far between.  We’d also made sure to wear shirts underneath the Color Flash shirts so we could strip off the colored ones after the race and we brought beach towels to lay down on the car seats so they didn’t also become rainbow colored.

Because this was not a timed event I can’t give you an official time or our rankings, but that is A-OK with me.  I judge my success that day not by time but by how colorful we were at the end. You can judge for yourselves how we did :).

In other news my ankle is also colorful.  A bruise blossomed on the ankle on Saturday.  It was bothering me a bit on my run that day. I noticed right afterwards the ankle bone had turned red and the next morning it was bruised. As of today it looks like this.

Bruise and all it felt just fine a couple of hours after the run, fine all day yesterday, and fine today. I can walk pain free and finished the Color Flash with no difficulty and with no pain at all. My next physical therapy appointment is on Wednesday so we’ll see if the new development means a new plan of action (aka I get to have that MRI after all, ugh) or if since I am in no pain I can continue on as planned. I haven’t had a run scheduled since the ankle bruised, my first time trying will be tomorrow.  If it bothers me I’ll stop.  A one minute pity party follows. It is frustrating to do everything I’m told and still my ankle rebels against me by bruising. I go to physical therapy, go to the doctor, get fitted for the right shoes, take my rest days, ice the ankle, etc. and still this happens.  Frustrating as heck.

And honestly a little scary too. Scary in that the bruise may indicate something more than tendonitis. And that this late in the game any new development like this will cause a doctor or physical therapist to tell me the marathon is a no go. But I am a lawyer. I am skilled in the art of persuasion. If need be I may hop up and down on the injured leg to make my point that it seems to be just fine. Just different looking now.