Winter Pineapple Classic 5K "Race" Report

They gave us timing chips.

We all laughed. What's the point of a timing chip when...

Two people on your team are recovering from a marathon?
One person on your team hasn't run in months (okay fine except once six weeks ago)?
There are "unknown obstacles" along the way?
The reason for doing this event was to dress up, act silly, and hang out with friends?

But we dutifully put the timing chips on our shoes anyway.

My friends and I fielded two teams today: Princess Power, consisting of Danielle, Latosha, Aleks, and Regan, and HodgePodge, consisting of Wendy, her husband Eric, my husband John, and me. The race was allegedly 5K, but we all thought it felt shorter, with obstacles your team has to get through together.

It took a long time to get started; this is the first year this event has been done, and the race bottlenecked at the final big obstacle. Race organizers did as good a job as they could have under the circumstances, but we started probably 40 minutes after our start time (team start times were staggered to prevent bottlenecks) and even so, had to wait more than 20 minutes at the final obstacle. But who cares? I might look up our times when they're posted, but it will be out of curiosity, not because we were competitive.

And as I said to Wendy at the end (and she told me I had to blog this), I wish there had been more obstacle and less course. Running was okay...nothing hurt, per se...but the first mile felt just like a seventh or eighth mile on a regular day. Nothing hurts, nothing is too terribly tired yet, but the legs don't quite feel fresh.

We had fun, though. We ran by some girls with pom-poms right at the beginning, and I yelled to John (who took off on a sprint - he's not so good at pacing himself yet), "Watch out for those cheerleaders! They're the first obstacle, trying to sucker you off-course!"

We had to crawl through tires, run around cones and ladders on the ground, and jump through tires. Pretty fun. Then we got to a cool obstacle: there were two walls we had to scale, only using our bodies to do it. The first wall was low enough to grab the top and kind of haul ourselves over, but the second was taller than me (5'3"). So somehow John throws himself over, then Eric made a little step with his hands for me and pushed me up and I got myself the rest of the way over. Wendy used the same method as me, then Eric levitated or something to get over.

The final obstacle, where the racers got backed up, was a rope ladder thing to climb (like something you'd see on a playground). We had to climb up, get ourselves over, then climb down. I went first. It looked deceptively easy, but once I was climbing, I realized I had to hold on tight and keep my balance. Then getting over the top was really scary - I got that feeling in the pit of my stomach like I was going to fall. And when I did get over and was on the way down, I was really close to the middle of the grid, which is more wobbly. I was glad to be done. Both Eric and John flipped themselves over at the top and said they felt no fear. Men!

I didn't get to see Princess Power run - since the obstacles were secret, the race organizers kept the teams waiting for the start inside a building. But it was cool to hang out in the morning with the gals. They wore cute purple-and-pink plaid skirts and tiaras, of course. The boys with Wendy and me said no pink and no tiaras, so we wore blue, red, and green leis instead (the event had a Hawaiian theme).

In other news, my weight this morning was 136.2 and I successfully resisted temptation twice today: Aleks brought bagels this morning and I only had a small piece of John's, and after the race we went to Starbucks and I didn't get a peppermint mocha. (I did have milk in my americano, but only a little. I know I said no dairy, but Starbucks doesn't have non-dairy creamer.) So I'm on my way to 130 pounds! Life will be perfect then.

Oh wait. It pretty much is now. :-)