Don’t let life be the pits!

Rainbow mud. That’s how I would describe my appearance on Sunday morning after a few friends and I, along with 7500 other people, completed The Color Run 5k downtown. Now, this wasn’t so much a race as it was a colorful street party. For those of you who haven’t heard of The Color Run, the gist of it is that you start the run wearing a clean white shirt, and along the course, you get gently pummeled with colored powder; at the end, you look like something out of Willy Wonka.

I can say with total certainty that I’ve never had so much fun in a race! Our team–for PEACH’s sake–had one objective: get as colorful as possible. To accomplish this, we rolled around in color that had fallen to the ground at each station. STOP. DROP. ROLL. COLOR. It just goes to show, getting exercise and being active doesn’t have to be a drag. While this certainly wasn’t an intense cardio work-out, jogging and laughing at the same time with friends make for very fun physical activity.

You don’t have to be an Ironman competitor to complete a race. There are lots of runs and walks still left this summer and fall that would be great for the whole family to do, or if you’ve never completed a race before, there’s no better time than now to push yourself and do one! You can look at a fairly comprehensive list of races in and around Louisville here. There are a number of races for charity, so you can support a good cause and get in some exercise at the same time. Maybe you can even get a team together and make silly shirts for the race (“Don’t let life be the pits” was our team motto for The Color Run). However you go about it, I would highly recommend doing a race. Whether you run, walk, or do some combo of both, you’re going to feel great after you cross that finish line.

Here’s to life, more life!

My turn to blog this month happened to land on my birthday. Today, I am 25 years old–old enough to rent a car–and am up for celebrating!

I’ve seen people reach this age and commence to freak out because of all they were supposed to have done by 25–get married, have kids, land the dream job and dream house, and so on–but that’s not how I want to spend this day or this year. Sure, there’s a whole slew of milestones on a life list I would have liked to reach by now (oh, salary and benefits, one day we will meet) and aspects of my life I want to change, but I want to spend more time celebrating what I do have in my life, not lamenting what isn’t.

This morning, I kicked off the day with a bowl of cereal and a challenge: to jog the full loop at Iroquois Park non-stop, twice. Last year on this day, I huffed and puffed those hills and completed the full route jogging non-stop for the first time, so I thought I’d up the ante a little this year. My knees didn’t like it, and I was sweating glistening like crazy, but I pushed through, and 6.4 miles later, made it to the end. While my pace was nothing to write home about, I was excited just to finish and not pass out at the end.

Whatever your age, keep on challenging yourself and celebrating yourself.

Running past the woods today, I was thinking about people I’ve known in my life who never reached 25 and how incredibly lucky I am to be healthy enough to still be here, running. Today, I celebrate my health and my community–friends, family, neighbors, social justice allies, and YMCA pals. You should go celebrate something today! I plan on celebrating by crossing the bridge and having the best ice cream in all of Kentuckiana at Mom & Pop’s Cone Corner in New Albany later today. Maybe I’ll see you there.