Run For Your Lives

Yesterday I ran in the Run For Your Lives 5K in PA.  I signed up a long time ago because you could both run and be a zombie.  Somehow I missed the fact entirely that this was an obstacle race.  I swear at that time the website didn’t say a thing about it.  The site has been totally redesigned since I signed up.

I started out running.  You get a belt like in flag football with 3 flags on it.  When your flags are taken, you are dead.  I was dead by the second set of zombies.  At first the race was fun.  I liked the part where we ran through this long tunnel in the dark with zombies jumping out at us.  It was all slippery on the floor and I had a guy try to pass me and he wiped out.

After that part we went into about 100 yards of waist deep water.  Everyone was walking after we got out of that.  It was so muddy and sloppy that it was dangerous to run.  There were 4 foot walls to climb over.  I got good at those since there were a lot.  I did a belly crawl in a mud pit under barbed wire.  That’s where I got hurt.  I scraped up my knees pretty badly and had blood running down my leg.  I skipped the later mud crawls because I couldn’t tell under all the mud how open the wounds were but decided not to stick it in mud again.  I also skipped anything with electric shocks because I’m not stupid.

There was a center section that just sucked.  It was two huge uphills in the mud.  I hate sliding downhill so took the downhills slowly.  By the end of the course they started having obstacles made of hay mounds you have to go over.  My raising came out there.  I spent much of my formative years climbing up to get bales down for Spirit.  I was passing people going up and down those piles.  I went up one and realized that you had to jump down into the blood pit to get off of it.  I just hoped my wounds weren’t that bad and jumped into the waist deep water.

By the end the zombies were hugging you and giving you high fives.  What an encouraging bunch of ghouls!

This is me after the race.  That shirt was white when I started.  My medal says infected because zombies killed me.  There weren’t a lot of survivor medals that I saw.

Then I got to be a zombie!

I went as Zombie Medusa.

There was an assembly line of makeup artists working on people.  The last step was being doused with blood.

More blood was thrown on the zombies before we went out on course.

I was working my patch of ground with the bride and groom.

I was the first zombie on course.  We were told to be gentle and give them hope since there were 11 sets of zombies to go through.  I let anyone who didn’t look like they exercised regularly pass by.  I only grabbed people’s flags if they came right at me.  Then it was a challenge.  Other people did this too.  They’d get in people’s faces and growl but not take their flags.

There was another group of zombies that we could see.  They had chasers who would run with people.  I was stumbler so I just stood my ground and could grab anyone who got close.  The chasers would let most people go by but mostly liked to scare them.  I saw one runner panic when one came up to her.  She stopped, covered her eyes, and screamed.  I had one man throw his wife at me when he ran behind her.  I yelled, “He pushed you!  Get him!” and didn’t take her flag.  I figured he was a dead man anyway.

The last group of runners we saw started with a bunch of Marines.  They were coming fast and a zombie behind me said, “Ok, this is a little scary.”  They came right at us so we had to kill them.  They were too cocky.  By the time they hit the zone 3 zombies that we could see they were mostly dead.  The slower runners in that group with them were doing better, especially since we were walking up the road as they were running past and we started distributing the flags we had back to the runners!

Here’s the zombies we were next to at work.

Clean up last night was tough. I had fake blood all through my hair and had to scrub off makeup. Some of the dirt I thought I had on my legs were bruises. I look like I’ve been beaten on my knees and thighs and there is big bruise on my right forearm that I can’t explain.