Milestone accomplished! As in, the ‘doing an activity you love with your kid who expressed interest’ milestone!
On Friday, Koala and I ‘ran’ our first race together. I was so pumped because after the Jerusalem marathon last year, he told me he wanted to run with me one time.
We got our chance with the first-time-in- Israel Running With Color – NATAL’s Run for PTSD in Tel Aviv.
UPDATE (18/11/13): I just became aware that this run was not related to the official The Color Run organization… this whole time I was under a totally different impression, which is probably a PR problem somewhere. So below is what I was expecting, and might explain why I was disappointed.
The Color Run is ‘the happiest 5k on the planet!’ – a branded global organized run where you get to run a moderate distance for the sake of having totally colorful fun while doing it. Are they coming to your city? Check out this video to get super pumped about it:
The idea is you run through the course in white, while at several points you have ‘paint’ (in our case corn flour and food coloring) tossed on you in happy rainbow clouds.
So Koala and I had been counting down from a month before. I signed us up for the 1.5km ‘Fun Run’ track. We ‘practiced’ on the way to gan in the morning. We cheered when we got our cute white shirts.
He’s a 4 and a half year old boy, so I knew he might get put off by the color-being-thrown-at-you aspect. And he was, because he didn’t like the idea of someone slapping it on, but ‘lo nora’ – he walked around the paint stations and watched me tutu dance my way through the colors.
Here’s what I loved about the rainbow unicorn happiness run:
- I got to run with my kid! There were so many kids. A great opp to get yours into running.
- Themed runs are a nice break from the sporty ones… well, at least now at the moment when I can’t do the major sporty ones.
- Lots of people got really into it! I made tutus for Koala and I to wear; he didn’t wear his in the end but I wore mine. A few other adults/kids wore tutus too and I think we made a lot of folks warm and fuzzy!
- Tzahal got really into it, which makes sense given the cause (Natal). Actually, all three male winners of the 5k were Tzahal guys. There was also a big Yachad contingent.
A ‘color run’ or ‘running with color’ is an awesome idea. The problem was, in this case, there wasn’t much color… Here’s what I want the organizers to keep in mind for next year:
- MORE PAINT.
- Were they supposed to be tossing it on us like in the video, or slapping us on the back with a handful?
- Maybe less apathetic paint throwing staff?
- MORE PAINT STATIONS. The whole 1.5km had three, two close to each other at the end. The whole 5km had more but there were long stretches with nothing to keep you going… maybe more signs, music, cheering crowds might have been more the atmosphere you’d expect?
- The 1.5 was so incredibly anticlimactic that my brother and I joined the 5k starting right after to get our fill. Maybe that’s our problem for being ‘real’ runners trying to make a kid happy, but still… it wasn’t as exciting as it coulda been.
- Granted I was towards the end of the 5k as I walked half of it, but lots of people ended up rolling on the floors of the paint stations to actually get some color, and many had to take the paint from the buckets for themselves… Maybe having those shakers like in the video would have given more of the cloud effect we expected?
Here are some more alternative views of the event…
The hair:
The hand:
The victory:
The token Israeli flag among Tzahal runners:
The car:
All in all, I’m happy Koala and I did it. I told him after there is an occasional Tzur Hadassah race… he was immediately interested and asking “Ima when are we doing the Tzur Hadassah run?!”
To be continued…
Here are more pictures from the רצים בצבע site and lots more on Facebook.
Whadya got: