Zombie Run

One of my faces asked how my Zombie 5K Obstacle Course went after seeing some pictures on Facebook.

In a word: miserable.

You all may remember I started training for this in December using the Couch-to-5K app, which I love.  You may also remember I got sick a few weeks ago and started slacking on my training then, so I was a little nervous about the run this past Saturday.

Turns out it didn’t matter how much I trained, because there was one thing I wasn’t prepared for: copious amounts of mud.  

Initially I thought this was due to the terrible storms we’d had the night before, but one of the other runners we encountered told us they had intentionally made the course muddy.  Seriously, it was so muddy that my friend Heather lost a shoe at least three times during the 3.1 miles.  I might have lost one too except I had tied mine on so tight they were almost impossible to get off afterward.  

We walked the whole thing.  Slowly.  It took us almost 2 1/2 hours to finish the course.  By the time we were done, we would have been covered in mud – except that one of the last obstacles involved swimming across a freezing cold river.

I only wish I was joking.

I do not know how people run in that kind of mud.  It was like trying to run in quicksand.  Halfway through the course I was ready to give up and sit down and wait for someone to rescue me; only Heather’s encouragement kept me going.

So, the 5K part? Not so fun.  But you know what was a lot of fun? Being a zombie!

Heather and I had volunteered to be zombies, so before our run, we got costumes and professional make-up and they put us on a particularly muddy section of the course with a bunch of other zombies.  Our job was to act like zombies and take flags off the belts of passing runners – if runners lost all their flags, they too became "zombies".  It was a blast!  Although I did lose my boots at one point (considering the weather the previous night, I wisely decided to bring one pair of shoes to "zombie" in and another to run in) and ended up doing the last two hours of my shift barefoot in the cold mud, I had so much fun.  

Moral of the story: zombie = fun, 5K-mud-run = not fun.