Race Review - Vampire 5K

Kellan crossing the finish line in total darkness.

On a whim, my son and I decided to run the Vampire 5k last Friday night. Originally I wasn't planning on doing this event, being that it was on a Friday night and after a long work week I typically don't feel like running. But, they said they were honoring online prices for day of registrations, and the boy and I weren't doing anything, so we decided to check it out last minute. So last minute, in fact, that I had already done some serious race training at UFL. So I was in for double duty.

We arrived at about 6:15PM and breezed through the day of registration. The fairgrounds had a makeup booth for vamps, a food-mobile, a free massage tent, the booze vendor and a "tattoo tent" where you could get some fang marks applied to your virgin flesh.

The premise of the race is citizens v. vampires. The 2 groups start at different gates, converge in the middle somewhere and finish together. I was unsure how this would play out and had visions of us crashing headlong into a huge mass of vampires at about 1.5 miles into the race. To differentiate the groups, the vamps wore black shirts and the citizens wore white, with a black in reserve if you get "turned". You turn into a vampire when your flags are swiped. Each citizen gets two flags. Once they are taken, you don the black shirt (provided by V5K) and join the hunt.

A couple things I noticed right away before the race. There were a lot of vampires milling about. Also, the event seemed to attract a lot more women than men. But, as we all know, chicks dig vampires.

The race was slated to start around 7:30, or dusk, whichever came last. The organizers had touted about running under a full moon, but when I saw the moon rising Monday around 6:30, on my way home from work, I knew there would be no moonlight running for us and it would be very dark when the sun went down. Fun fact: the moon rises 50 minutes later each day.

As the sun began to disappear behind the mountains, they had us citizens march off to our starting point. There's a shallow creek to cross and the "bridge" was backed up, so a few of us just sloshed across. I figured we'd be crossing it again soon enough and I wasn't wrong. We got to the starting gate and waited. And waited. And waited some more. Our wet feet were getting cold and my muscles were stiffening as the air temperature dropped fast with the setting sun.

Finally someone announced that they were having some technical difficulties with the smoke machines and were waiting on a phone call. A guy dressed as a demon went over the rules (no stopping or running back along the course, no contact and he explained how the flags worked) and tried to cheer us up, but we were all getting a little restless, not to mention cold. After another several minutes (we must have stood there for at least half an hour), I got the impression someone must have made the "screw it" executive decision and started us off with little fanfare.

We're off! Fortunately the guy in front seems to know where to go, because the course is not clear. We start out in the front 10 and my cold muscles are not happy right away. As we get closer to the path that follows the creek, the temps drop significantly. But after the first mile I warm up and don't notice it anymore. The route winds back and forth with some volunteers along the way to point us in the right direction. About halfway through, Kellan and the lead half dozen start pulling away and I lose him in the encroaching darkness.

I'm plodding along, staying the course, when suddenly my right side flag gets taken from me as a vampire boy lightly runs past me. I begin shouting to the citizens up ahead, that there's a vamp coming. I'm trying to figure out where he came from, but as we make another switch back turn, I see where the vamps are merging in with the citizens about a 1/4 mile back. Now I get it. They merge in, but have to keep pressing forward, so being up front, I'm only getting the fastest vampires who are pushing through to the leaders. The middle of the pack is getting slammed with hundreds of vampires. I'm sure it was total chaos back there.

At one point we were sharing a wide path, with the front half going one way and the back half going the other way. Things got interesting here and I had to sprint off course and make a big loop through the field to avoid the hungry ghouls making attempts at my last remaining flag. I had slowed down to a fast walk for about 10 paces right before the creek and this allowed a woman vampire to come up and make a swipe for my flag. Fortunately she missed as I dodged last minute and I kept my flag... but not for long. Along the last mile a vamp came out of nowhere and swiped my last flag.

I put on my black shirt and managed to snag one flag before the end of the race. Somewhere along the way I passed a smoke machine, but the only thing coming out of it that resembled smoke was the exhaust fumes from the small generator. At the finish line I was disappointed to see no timer clock. I didn't wear my watch and had no clear idea when the race began or what time it currently was.

With no official times, we had to guess at our placements by the number of people at the finish, how many had passed us, etc. We placed Kellan in the top 15 for sure, maybe as high as top 10. Myself, we figured around 25-30. Kellan nearly survived. He said the same young vamp that had snagged my first flag had run him down in the last stretch to the finish.

I wandered over to the free drink stand for what I thought would be a nice can of something. Instead, I find a table full of tiny 8oz. plastic cups, full of ice and the good stuff only filling about 3/4 of the cup. The lady explaining the favors available warns me that it's 9% alcohol (so almost as strong as a glass of white wine? The horror!). But the partial mouthful of liquid in the cup would need to be about 90% to have any effect. So I have my single swallow and wander over to the kool-aid stand and have a small cup of the "vampire juice", then we called it a night. We didn't really feel like hanging out in the cold longer than we had too.

In short, it was interesting, but had some serious flaws. If you don't know how to use smoke machines, you should probably test before the race and figure it out. If you want to have a night race, best to understand the sunset and moonrise tables. Also, it gets cold in Colorado at night, especially in the early Spring. This event was too early in the season to be run at night. Lastly, for $60 an entry for a race that has no real setup or obstacles, you could at least have a clock so people could get some idea of what times they ran.

I give it an A for effort and a D for execution. It was kind of fun and a good warm-up for Spartan (which is this Saturday), but not worth the price. With some proper organization it could be a real winner. If anyone ran this event in another city, drop me a line and let me know how it compared to Denver's inaugural run.