The Color Run San Diego

It's been 18 months since I have participated in an organized race and although the Color Run was not timed and more for fun, it was exactly the motivation I needed to get back into running. I worked myself back up to 3 miles using the Couch to 5K program and by Saturday, I felt ready.

Even better, I had a great group of friends to make the experience even more fun - race veteran Tara and newbies Shami, Tina and her husband Johnny. We even had fun on the drive down to San Diego!

And for those of you who may not be familiar, the idea of the color run is to start the race wearing mostly white, getting doused in a particular color for each kilometer of the race known as color zones and finishing the race looking like a rainbow threw up on you.

Here we are before:

At the start line:

Seriously, look at ALL the people at this event:

We were team Leg Warmers! Not the best decision given that it ended up being in the high 70's:

During the race - been through pink, yellow, orange and getting ready for blue:

And after:

The grand finale is the "color festival" they have every 15 minutes at the finish line, which produces this cool color cloud:

Like I said, the whole thing was a blast:

So what's next? Well my inaugural and only straight 5K race happened in February 2011 at the Palm Springs half marathon and 5K so I am looking at signing up to run it again in 2013 with the goal of improving my time. I would also like to eventually be able to run a 10K but I am not making any promises beyond that. Right now I am still coming down from the high of participating in an organized running event again as well as working on removing the last traces of color that still remain two days later.

And a big ole thank you to the hubby, who stayed home with our kids, Johnny and Tina's two boys and Kuma and Harley so that we could all spend the day down in San Diego for the run.