Sammamish River Run 2013!

Race number 11 under my belt!!!

I signed up for this race because one of my friends wanted to do her very first half marathon with me and was looking for something close to her house. So we picked this race, it seemed easy enough, it was just out and back, very flat course.

We were super excited as time got closer to the race. I could not have been happier to run my first half marathon with a friend. I have to be honest, I was a little nervous, I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to keep up or not. I've been having a lot of knee problems lately, although I taped both knees with the KT tape, I wasn't sure how well it was going to hold up.

The morning of the race I get a text from K and she is telling me that it is pouring down rain in Snohomish, where the race was starting. I was so glad that she had texted me that because in Kirkland, where I live the weather was perfectly fine. I did grab a rain jacket, because I didn't want to get wet and then cold afterwards. Sure enough, as soon as I started driving north the rain just started pouring and it was still pitch black outside. The race started at 8:30, but they were closing the streets to the pre-paid parking area at around 7:30, so I wanted to make sure that we got there on time. K and I met up at a McDonalds and then I drove us to the starting area, which was at the Rotary Park in Everett. The rain was still coming down hard, we decided to walk to the starting line and just kind of check out the area and see what was going on. Thankfully K had picked up my race packet with hers the day before, so we were all ready to go. There wasn't much going on around there and it was super cold, so we decided to go back to the car and wait until about 15 minutes before the start of the race to go back. It was so nice and toasty in the car and by the time it was time for us to head to the starting line the rain had completely stopped. I have been so lucky that I have not had any races up until this point with any rain. It was still a little cold, but we figured it would get much better once we started running. We took our energy gels and off we went.

The course was very beautiful and peaceful, we ran along a river pretty much the whole time. There were huge farms with lots of land and cows everywhere. It was kind of fun that there were train tracks next to the road we were running on and there was a train passing by and he kept blowing the horn the entire time he passed us. As we got to about mile marker 5 we passed a water station and I totally saw one of the volunteers picking up non crushed cups from the garbage and re-filling them with water!!!!!!!!! Do you believe that, honestly I didn't believe it at first myself, but its the truth. I was telling K about it and she didn't believe me, who would, right, because who would actually do that!

A few miles into the race, K's parents called and said that they were going to meet us at the turn around part of the race and that her Mom was going to run back with us. So at mile 5 is when we got to the turn around and sure enough, there they were, it was awesome to see a familiar face and we were able to give our rain jackets for K's Dad to take with him since it wasn't raining anymore.

As we were running back now and made our way back to that awful water station I told you about earlier, they were ALL OUT OF CUPS! Now she believed me that they were recycling the cups from the garbage. So now they had sports bottles and asked if we wanted to get some water squirted into our mouths, this was seriously the most disgusting thing I've ever seen in all of the races I've done. It's not like it was the first time they had put on this race, you would think that they would have been better prepared. Believe me, we got a survey after the race and we gave them a piece of our minds, that's for sure.

Anyway, enough of me ranting about that, back to the race. We ended up walking a little bit during the last leg of the race, but we finished strong. We came across another water station at mile 10 that didn't have cups, so no more water until the end of the race. K's boyfriend ended up coming and surprising her at the end and we all crossed the finish line together and happily accepted our medals!

After the race, they had warm soup, which was amazing, we tried the baked potato, but they also had a veggie minestrone and lots of bread and water to drink. There was a booth with energy drinks and we all scored awesome beer mugs. We got super cold, super fast, so we didn't hang out for too long.

 

If you are reading, thanks K, for making this a memorable race and hope to do more in the future with you!

Hope to see you at my next race in Bellingham!

Keili

The COLOR RUN Seattle 2013!

This past Sunday my friends and I ran the Seattle Color Run. We had been waiting for this run for a year, we missed the opportunity to sign up last year, because it sold out in hours, but this year we got in early and were ready to go.

If you haven't heard about this event yet, you should look into it for sure. Its a 5K and they have set up differnet color stations through out the course, where you get hit with powdered color. Each station has its own color, so by the end of it you will be all rainbow colored. They do have a finish line festival as well, where they had a DJ playing and bunch of color run employees just throwing swag into the crowd and free color packets. When you sign up for the race each racer gets a color packet as well to throw at the end with everybody else.

The race started at 9:00AM at the Seattle Center, I had went and picked up the race packets the day before, so I knew exactly where to go. We carpooled so we only had to find one parking space since its so hard to find one escpecially during an event like this. We made it there with about a half an hour to spare and found a space only a few blocks away for FREE!!! I was excited, parking in Seattle is expensive. I brought Chase with me as well, children under 5 are free. Since he is still a bit too small to run a whole 5K, I decided it was best for everybody that I put him in the stroller and then have him come out right before the color stations and run through them with me. One of my friends brought her Mom with her, it was on Mother's day after all, she was so kind to push the stroller for me while we ran.

First was the yellow station, the coolest thing was that as we were running down the street you could see a huge yellow cloud, it was all the powdered paint being thrown at people. You really had to be close to the volunteers if you wanted to get super colored, if you stayed in the middle of the crowd you really did not get much color on you. You do have to keep your mouth closed though, some of us got a mouthful and it did not taste good or look paticularly pretty on your teeth :) Next color was orange, then they had a water station exactly at the half way point, they even had their own color run branded water cups! Next up was pink and lastly Chases favorite blue.

I do wish that they had a few more color stations through out the course, the colors could have been endless, but because of the color station it did make this run fly by, it felt like the shortest 5K I've ever ran. On the map that they had posted online they showed 5 color stations, but it actually ended up being 4. In any case we had so much fun.

Hope to do this again next year, see you there!

Keili