Run Or Dye

Saturday I ran in Run or Dye in Kingston, Ontario.  The people who are reading this that know where I live are thinking, ‘Kingston?  you live in Bridgenorth dude!’ And you are right to think that.  I drove about 5 hours round trip to run in a race that was over in less than 30 minutes!

Insane?

Yes!

But it was fun and when I signed up for the race in early August I wasn’t even thinking about the driving distance.  Tara, that I met at Run For Your Lives was suggesting that we all do a colour run, but everything was at the pre-register stage. This run came up first and Sarah and I signed up for it.

We drove to Kingston through the POURING rain Saturday morning where we had to leave the house at the ungodly hour of 5:30am.  When we arrived at the event the rain had pretty much stopped, though we did luck out when we went inside to get our race kits because for about two minutes it poured again and people were coming into the building looking like they had just jumped in a lake!

Then the waiting for the race started, we lined up in the starting chute and they were letting about 50 people at a time go.  They had the guy on a mic pumping everybody up and music and the group was doing the wave and whatnot.  People were using their dye packs.  Everyone got a little packet of powdered dye and a white shirt to wear for the race and so there was clouds of dye everywhere.

Our wave came up and by that time I was pretty purple with splotches of green and orange. I stayed with Sarah as we ran up a pretty steep hill up into the base at Fort Henry.  And we stuck together for about 90% of the race. There was a couple walking breaks along the way, but overall Sarah did amazing.  Throughout the race course there was dye stations where people were waiting with handfuls of colour to get you.  Sarah took a face full of pink dye and looked ridiculous for the rest of the day!  There was only about one and a half or two kilometres to go when Sarah told me to go off without her.  I asked if she was sure and she said yeah, so I ran off and finished, then came back through the course to meet up with her and finish again with her.  There was no timing chips so it wasn’t a big deal.

I finished in about 25 minutes and Sarah was maybe 27-28 or so, really quite good considering that we did a bit of walking along the way.

I’m glad I went, but I think next year there will be more local races done and less driving!

Waiting to start

 

After the running