As you all know I do a lot of races, but races get expensive, and you do have to limit yourself.
However when I am running, often times I get so excited by the people standing at the water stations and in random places cheering me and everyone around me on!  I love this!  And I usually think to myself, ‘Man, if I weren’t running, I’d love to be cheering these people on!’

Fitness is something I really enjoy and my family and friends can attest that I want everyone involved!

The Asheville Color Run came up this year and it wasn’t at all on my radar… however, this little email came through at work that they needed volunteers…. I do recall 3-4 years ago running a color run and my kids just loved standing at the finish line throwing that colorful powder (which I learned today is mostly powder and Baking Soda mixed together …making it non-flammable… who knew??)

So, I signed me and my boys up.
Showed up at 5:45am… oh that dreaded alarm going off at 4:45am on a Summer Saturday morning was dreadful- I mean, if I didn’t go, who would really know??  But I’m a girl of my word.  And so I trudged out of bed, changed clothes, poured my coffee, woke the boys and trudged into the car by 5:15am to arrive on time.  As there was a little note in the volunteer email saying that color stations were granted first come first serve, and heck I wasn’t gonna get up that early in the morning to do trash duty or something…lol.

We arrived, checked in, were assigned our ‘Color Zone’ and in awesomeness we were in the ‘Orange Zone’ which was also the first zone.  That meant we put the first spray of color on these runners!

I also found out at check in that we had 6000 runners to color!  Wow!
We met our zone teammates, (Made a new friend 🙂  Thanks Leslie) and were given our instructions and a quick walk through by Eli, our zone ‘commander’ … or whatever his title was.  Helped set  some last minute things up.  Ate breakfast, finished our coffee… I mean, we were at our station 1.5 hours before start time… yikes.  We had a total of 9 people at our station (including my 2 boys) and 2 of them were official Color Run people.
So how does it work?  We start with 3 trashcan barrels of color powder.  We had probably 30 squeeze bottles to fill with this colorful powder….then we wait…and wait… until…

There are runners!
 They start waves of runners at 7:45am.  The runners start to show up and line up around 7:15.  I don’t think there’s a strict time to show up but the last wave starts at 9am.

Biggest rules were spray below the shoulders, be nice to kids and gentle, and don’t waste color…lol… but get them all!  Powder was EVERYWHERE!  Luckily our new friends thought of bringing masks to cover our nose and mouth, so that saved our lungs!  Sunglasses were not a great idea because the powder just covered them to the point you couldn’t see.
I did get a chunk of powder in my eye once, but it was all good. My kids lasted for 3/4 of the time before they just pooped out, but they met every group of runners straight on and did a great job!  I had to remind them of the rules every few groups, but they were great!  We all got really colorful!

I did see some friends come through and that was really exciting to get to color them or even get a quick picture with them!
My fitbit told me I took like 8000 steps- my arms did some hard work 🙂

So, after all the runners came through at 9am, we start clean up- sweep up the powder caked on the road, take down the décor, and we were back in our car by 9:45am.
Got some great laughs, a fun experience, a new friend, and new shirts out of it… and a dirty car… and we didn’t pay the $50 price tag to get all colorful 🙂

Additional  photos taken by the Asheville Citizen  Times can be found… see here