Distance running with a soaking wet gorilla

First and foremost, I can happily report that I survived the Krispy Kreme Challenge this weekend! Despite 4 miles, 12 donuts, 2400 calories, 7500 runners, 34-degree weather and nonstop pouring rain, I survived! Everyone had to arrive an hour early for pre-race registration. Mostly that involved standing around shivering in the rain, wondering why the heck I signed up for this event. On the plus side, I met a lot of phenomenal people! Including Elvis (...ish), the two guys from Dumb & Dumber (...ish), a guy wearing nothing but black body paint and two strategically-placed Frisbees (...yeek), and a guy in a full gorilla costume which had to have weighed 40 pounds when you include the amount of rainwater it had absorbed.

(Sorry it's blurry. I was shivering uncontrollably at this point.)

I haven't competed in a cross-country/road race since the state championships my freshman year of high school, and I've never been in a race with thousands of runners like this one has. There were so many people lined up at the starting line, it took over 5 minutes from the time the starting gun went off to the time my part of the crowd actually made it up to the line to truly start the race.

A few quick miles later, I arrived at Krispy Kreme, passed through a chute to pick up a boxed dozen donuts... ...and then crouched down in the Krispy Kreme parking lot with all these other runners and ate until I lost my will to live. I learned that if you stack up 3 donuts then smash them flat, you can pretend it's just one really dense donut and eat it all at once. That's a life skill that will probably never come in handy, but a life skill nonetheless. Things went well until donut #9, at which point I thought I heard my stomach audibly beg, "Please, don't hurt me anymore." I mercilessly fed it 3 more donuts, showed my empty box to the gate judge, and starting running again. I had thought running with a dozen donuts in my stomach would make me feel ralphy. But actually, eating the donuts had been so unpleasant that resuming running felt like a relief by comparison. The worst part was seeing the splattered donut remnants on the pavement all the way back to the finish line; mementos of the people whose GI tracts hadn't been so lucky. Ultimately, I had a fantastic amount of fun, didn't yammer, and didn't freeze to death! Plus, I finished in the top 100 women out of about 3,000! Wheeeee! ...totally never doing that again.