Run For Your Lives top 5 finish!

We ran the Run for Your Lives! 5k zombie run yesterday at Thunder Valley Motocros track in Lakewood, CO. The course was a lot more difficult than I thought it would be. Being on the motorcross track meant tons of long steep hills, many of which had to be crawled up, because doing it just on your feet caused some serious sliding back down. There was a ton of zombies. I heard 750 entered for the event and I'm guessing there were around 150-200 zombies on the course at any one time.

We ran the first heat (0900), in the first stage called "appetizer" and placed ourselves right up front to be nearly first out of the shoot.

Right away it was steep hills and razor wire. Much like the Spartan, the first mile was the hardest part. Getting over that initial first hump always kills me. Once I got past that, we moved forward at a good consistant pace.
If you're not familiar with RFYL, it's an obstacle race combined with flag football. Each runner has to wear 3 flags and the zombies, spread throughout the course, try to grab your flags to "kill" you. There are slow zombies and scary quick ones mixed in. Probably about 1 in 10 are fast zombies.
I took one for the team early on, losing a flag, but allowing a lot of runners to get by while I distracted the zombies.
At the top of the highest point was a long water slide into a breath robbing cold pool of water. It took me a good minute to get my wind back after that dunk.
Much sprinting and dodging zombies. Really tough cardio (first rule of Zombieland). Often times there'd be a zombie horde milling around and you really had to push through with a group to confuse the gouls.

We found working in teams was helpful. Hard cuts and spins were also the order of the day to dodge the nasty undead. My running mate, Dave, lost his last flag while I still retained the coveted Subaru flag, which entitles you to some Subie swag if you finish with it. He ran interference and helped me get past a particularly nasty fast zombie, nick named "The Douche" by our friend, Nadia.
Here's us putting the moves on The Douche.

With Dave's help I was able to finish with my last flag and get the title of "Survivor".

There were a few low crawl and electrified obstacles, but due to the area, it was mainly hills and zombies. I've seen pics from other locations that have monkey bars and the like, but this course had no upper body obstacles, aside from a couple low walls and one rope on a hill that was more help than hinderance.
One of the more interesting items was the slime pit towards the end. Here I am splashing into the pink goo and climbing out covered in what we figure must be some sort of lube, like KY jelly. Nasty stuff!

We finished strong and with Dave's help, I was able to pull out 5th place overall for survivors, and 4th for men's, winning my age group (30-39). Interesting thing about this race is you have to survive to be eligible for awards. I missed the award spot by one place, just 14 seconds behind the 3rd place finisher.

Overall, out of over 3,000 entries, survivors and victims, I placed 52nd. Not bad for a noob. :) Dave finished a strong 36th. Here we are at the end, covered in goo.

Awesome pics courtesey of http://www.photo-paragon.com/