Santa (Run) Baby

It’s July and I’m posting about a Santa Run. Well, I got a bit behind on my blogs. I actually wrote this one in February on the plane to Mallorca. Oops!? So, here it goes: The Santa Run.

After last years Santa Run I decided that I wanted to do another one this year. However, since I moved to Breda it wasn’t doable to do the one in Spijkenisse again. Luckily Breda has it’s very own Santa Run and I even got Hanno to go with me! Literally with me, because it was a short fun run. And what better way to start the fun, than with some oversized Santa suits. Seeing that it was the same kind of suit as last year, the one that could fit both Brigitte and me, I opted to just wear the jacket and transforming it into a dress. Hanno, however, choose to go full on Mr. Santa Clause, including the fake white beard. Sow e went on our way to the church where the start would take place.

The downside of this story is that the start was around dinner time and when we got to the church I was so hungry. And of course, you could only buy some soup onside, with cash. Guess what we didn’t bring with us. Luckily Hanno scored some chocolates, so I could hold on until we got home after the run.

Because of the huge amount of participants (with a lot of small children), we were assigned a start wave. Hanno and I thought we were signed up for the first or second wave but guess again. It turned out to be the fourth or fifth wave. Seeing that the first wave consisted of middle school children and their teachers, we silently joined the second wave and went our way.

Well, that was the intention. Only, we started somewhere in the middle of the wave, so we ended up passing a lot of other runners before we could actually run our own pace. This resulted in us being in front of our wave and getting lost with a few others. Well, not really lost. More: we thought we were running the right way until we came at a point where other runners were coming from our right side and I saw the mom with some small children that were standing next to me when we started. Perhaps we made a few extra miles I don’t know, but we were having fun which was the most important part. We continued on our way, this time on the course.

It wasn’t long before we were back at the start/finish church, with smiles on our faces we entered the building, where we heard our original start wave getting the ‘go’ signal. Looking at our watches, we saw we had done a 3.5K run. Not that long, but with a lot of fun. We were handed our medals and grabbed one of the complimentary plates of fries that they were handing out. Since I burned the few chocolates Hanno grabbed for me, I was so glad to get some food! We even got a second plate before we headed back to our bikes.

Even though we got hit by a massive hail storm on our way home and the little bit we went off course, I really thought it was an amazing night. It was my second Santa Run and maybe I can make this a tradition.