On blue hair and beer helmets

I’ve run in 5 races now (3 this year) and one could say they all start to run together except – they don’t. At least not yet, not for me. I remember each step of each one, who I was with, where the difficult hills were, who was cheering me on at the end. This one, though, was really something. Because when a race is sponsored by a brewery and it doesn’t even start until 4 in the afternoon (smart thinking, so the runners could partake in the brewery’s yummy products the night before), well, it’s gotta be something special.

Kevin, Chris, Rachel and I decided it was so special, in fact, that we wanted to dress the part for the Inaugural Terrapin 5K Plus One More Mile race, sponsored by this brewery and this hilarious T-Shirt company. I have a Terrapin Brewery T-Shirt with blue writing, so I started thinking what goes perfectly with that is my blue wig, of course! Kevin decided to wear a beer helmet. Sadly, Terrapin doesn’t make canned beer so he had to settle for PBR. For the record, the cans were empty (empty after Jeff drank them, that is.) Chris decked out in lights reading “beer pong” that he turned into a belt, and Rachel donned a pink cowboy hat to go with her pink running skirt. This all came together pretty last minute so we weren’t able to tell Gabe of our plan, but I’m sure he’ll join us next year in the dressing up. Well, maybe. He did win out of all of us.

Speaking of winning, my time was the worst ever this time around. There were 4 – count ’em, 4 – huge hills and my knee injury of a couple of weeks ago kept me from running the inclines – so I walked them. I made the 4.1 mile race in 42:26, slightly worse than 10-minute miles, slightly worse than my goal.

Worst time at a race ever.

Best time at a race ever.

Everyone else in the group beat me, and I’m super proud of all of them. We knew Gabe would smoke us and he did, Kevin came in at 37 minutes and some change as did Rachel, and Chris completed his first race in just 39 minutes. Way to go everybody! Jeff, Jenn, Breanna the dog and my fellow runners congregated at the finish line for my slow butt to come in, and as they were looking for me other bystanders asked, “Are you waiting for the blue lady? She should be here any minute.”

We were the only ones that dressed up but we have a feeling we might have started a trend. How fun! One lady asked if she could get her picture made with us and I think it’s pretty cool I was known as “the blue lady”. And yes, the wig was hot to run in, but it didn’t fall off or even threaten to fall off. Even during the sucky parts of the run I could look up and see people smiling at me and it would make me smile, remembering I had blue hair.

After the race we got a brewery tour and lots of beers and signature beer glasses and T-Shirts. In a nutshell, Terrapin hooked us up. Live music, fun with friends, the works. Terrapin knows how to throw a party, which they do every weekend from what I understand. I gotta visit Athens more often!

I will say there were some problems with the race organization. It started late, at least 5 minutes or so, which isn’t the end of the world but there was some confusion about where the start line was and which direction to face. The end, though, was what was really confusing: After running under the finish line, officials handed us a card and had us fill out our own times. Well, after 42 minutes and some change of running, it’s hard to remember exactly which second it was on as I ran under! And from what I could tell it may have been the “official” scorecard. Hmm. They were ordered by number – I know I came in 207th place – so there’s only so much fudging one could do but I’m pretty sure I wrote down 42:20 when it was actually 42:26 (which I saw later in the pictures Jeff took.)

Update: We got our official race times yesterday and they had mine correct (42:26). I feel a little better about the end now but I still don’t like that we had to fill out cards. The others were cheering me in as they were supposed to be filling out their cards and apparently they got bitched at! Not. Cool.

Quote of the day: As Kevin passed a guy during the race, the guy called out, “Awe man, the guy in the beer helmet is passing me!”