On April 25th, I ran the Graffiti Run in Denver. My friends and I had picked out this race months in advance because we had always wanted to do one.
What is the Graffiti Race?
There are many races like the graffiti run and they are mostly all the same. Everyone wears white and you throw ‘paint’ before you run, while you run, and after. If you are hoping to get in and out of this race and be clean, you SHOULD NOT attend. The paint is more like chalk dust that gets everywhere. It was very fun in the moment, not so fun afterwards.
The Race
My friend, Thomas Elio, and I have have both been training for the Colfax Half Marathon. So when I signed up for this race, so did he. We trash talked about it for weeks of who would win. 
We also went with my friend Melissa and her hubby. My hubby was demoted to photographer since he injured his foot. He was SUPER disappointed not to run with the rest of us. The race was at Mile High Stadium in Denver through the parking lot. Parking sucked!
When we made it to the starting line, we waited for the usual 10-15 minutes while they sent out waves of runners. I was already feeling kinda yucky: my lungs felt full of chalk, my mouth was dry from it and I felt like I was looking through sand. We had only begun the paint adventure. While you are running the course, you run through ‘color zones’ and earn a new color each time until you make it to the end. In the first color zone, a kid volunteer threw and entire handful of ‘paint’ right at my face and it filled my entire mouth. I was then spitting pink to clear my mouth.
ONCE AGAIN, the miles were not marked. How hard is it? This is the second race I’ve run with NO MARKERS. Thank goodness I was running my Nike+ app and knew how far I was. Thomas and I stayed together for the first mile or so. Then I got caught in a group of people that would not get out of the way. Do they know what a race is? I quickly lost sight of Thomas and knew I’d lost. I tried to just have fun running the distance, seeing the sights, and trying to avoid huge chunks of paint.
When I reached mile 2.5 I knew something was off. I could see the finish line but still had almost a mile to go! But……the race was only actually 2.8 miles, not a 5K. Wait to go Graffiti Run. Major Fail. But I ran the race fairly quickly considering how many people were in the way and still lost to Thomas.
Tips
Cover Your Mouth – While registering for the race, you could purchase a face covering and I thought “Bah! Who cares!” You will care. Trust me! Thomas was nice enough to bring an extra handkerchief and I would have died without it. I inhaled SO much chalk through my mouth and nose that it was hard to run sometimes even with my mouth covered. Seriously, you’ll want to. My boogers and ears were black for two days.
Wear Glasses – Same reasoning as above. You’ll want to keep as much debris out of your eyes as possible. While I never felt like I had to take my contacts out, it was sometimes hard to see.
White Will Dye – Someone warned me about this before the race. ANYTHING a light color or white will get dyed. Including headphone cords. So if you don’t want it dyed, don’t wear it. I wore a yellow sports bra that is now kinda green in some places because it’s all I had. Immediately after this race I bought a cheap-o bra for events like this so I don’t ruin a good bra again. Even parts of my skin where I sweat, like arm pits and toes were dyed for a few days.
Shoes and Pants Ok – I purposely wore my worst pair of shoes and pants that were too big in case they got ruined. However, my black pants were just fine after one wash. Either it didn’t soak in or you just can’t see it. My shoes, which were mostly gray, came out too. I clapped them around afterwards and most of the paint fell right out. Anything that get’s wet WILL DYE. I also brought an extra pair of clothes so I could strip in the parking lot before getting in my friend’s car. THINK THIS THROUGH before you leave the house! They gave us car seat covers at registration, but they turned out to be mostly useless.
Fun! – The race was definitely fun for a one time event. However, it was quite messy and I’m not very good at messy. By the time I’d showered and felt human again, the race took up the whole morning and afternoon. Just remember to plan extra time to clean up afterwards. I would do a race like this in the future, but not anytime soon! I’ll stick with fun that can be cleaned up faster!
