Night of the Running Dead

On Saturday my sisters, my brother in law, Preston and I all participated in the "Night of the Running Dead" out at the Utah State Fairpark. It is a 5k race, and you can choose whether you sign up as a "human" or as an "undead." The humans get a 2 minute head start, and then "run for their lives as the undead pursue them for a full five kilometers." HA! Brilliant! I thought the idea was so funny that I had to sign up. Even Preston was amused and agreed to do his first (and possibly last) race ever! Unfortunately, I was the only one who signed up as a zombie, so I had a lot of humans to catch and a lot of braaaaaains to eat.

Here is me practicing before the race (Preston and Val are not so good at pretending to run away in terror, even though I am looking very scary):

I was pretty lazy in my zombie outfit, but A LOT of the undead there were really into it and put a lot of effort into their costumes. It was fun to line up behing the "Zombie Hoarde" sign and get ready to chase down some humans. The humans took off, and our undead army approached the starting line. We roared a few times to let the humans know we were coming, and soon we were off!!! It was so awesome to see all of the zombies running down the street.

I caught up to Matt after a while and cheerfully said "Ate your brains!" as I passed him, but I kept running and running and running and I wasn't catching any of my other human friends. Cora had given me her cold a couple of days earlier, and my lungs really started to get angry with me after a while. I was really starting to be discouraged, when I saw Preston...running to join the crowd I was running in from a completely different direction than we were running. Wait....what? Turns out that the course wasn't very well marked and a lot of people made some wrong turns. I had been too busy running and looking for Manda's blue hat to notice. I left Preston behind and took off in search of Val's and Manda's brains, but met the finish line before I caught them. Dangit!

But as it turns out, they somehow ended up behind me by making a wrong turn (along with everyone around them) at the beginning of the race. The course was so messed up, Matt ended up running over 4 miles when a 5ks is only supposed to be 3.1 miles. Oh well. The race was fun (after I stopped coughing) and it raised money for cancer research, so I guess I can't be too angry that the course was totally messed up. They had it at a different location last year, so maybe by next year they will have figured everything out.

The T-shirts that came with the registration were pretty cool. You get a different one depending on whether you sign up as zombie or humans. The human t-shirts are white, and on the back they say: "Zombies don't eat FAST FOOD" (get it? FAST food?), and the zombie shirts say, "If you can't beat 'em, EAT 'EM." My dad was so amused he bought a shirt even though he was too busy watching Dax and Cora to run in the race.

Who wants to be a zombie with me next year? I promise to put a little more effort into my costume.