The ankle surgeon full-employment run...

Yes, it was mud run day! The "trail" turned out to be through a vineyard, which was as lumpy and uneven a surface as anybody could have wished, and the mud pit was - a huge pit of mud. It was great. Next year, we'll have to go in costume - we saw any number of bridesmaids dresses sacrificed to the cause, plus a dizzying array of other clever costumes - hula girls, a quartet dressed as Wizard of Oz characters (Dorothy, the Tin Man, the Lion, and Glenda the Good Witch, in another now-destroyed ballgown.) There was Elvis, a guy in a vintage 70's tuxedo and wig, someone in a toga and laurels, and a whole family in matching rainbow clown wigs. It was amazing.

The actual running was kind of odd - we started off very slowly, because funneling several hundred people between the rows of grapes in a vineyard takes a while. From there on out, it was nothing but hills (the vineyard was planted on a slope) and then the mud pit and then another huge hill. My time was shockingly good, so good that Mike and I concluded that they must have miscalculated the distance of the course. The only down side to the day was that while Grace was well enough to come, she wasn't well enough after a few days with a fever to run the kids' one-mile. She took it well and was excited to plan her costume for next year.






Afterwards we all showered off under some handy fire hoses, complete with fire truck and fire fighters to assist, and then I changed into dry clothes and we wandered around for a few minutes before heading to Perkin's for breakfast. Apparently the sight of a still-dirty, oddly damp, casually dressed person with filthy shoes is still an oddity at Perkin's among the after-church crowd, but I resisted the urge to explain that I'd been running, and usually I go into public with clean clothes on.

Editing to add: per the post-race email, the run was 2.5 miles, not 5K (which is 3.1 miles.) No wonder I seemed so speedy! Still, it was great fun, and Grace and I each got a cool stainless steel water bottle, which I'd just been debating about buying but couldn't decide if the no-brand Target ones were worth $10, which is not even to consider the fancier Sigg ones that are $20. I'd so much rather have a useful item than an ill-fitting race shirt!