Go nuts and get dirty – The ms Maasdam 5K Color Run

September 22nd, 2017

While sailing a 14-day Panama Canal cruise from Fort Lauderdale FL, to San Diego CA, I decided it was time for a 5K run again. The last one we did was a year ago in New Zealand and since that was a popular event, it would be time to top it of and to organize something big.

I decided to do something none of the ships had done before: a color run whereby runners get thrown colored powder. This is a phenomenon well known all over the world by runners and now time had come to introduce this to the, mostly, non-runners.

Looking at the itinerary, the best possible place would be Puerto Chiapas in Mexico. I know the area in this port, as this is one of my normal running ports. There is one road, and although this road can be busy, it is not so busy that it would be undoable. Besides that, I was convinced that we would be able to stop traffic for a little bit.

Good thing is that we do the Panama run several times, which gave me the opportunity to explore the options over the next couple of weeks. During our call in Chiapas I invited the mayor, the agent and some other local officials; we had lunch on the ship and I explained what I wanted. All of them were right away enthusiastic and with that in mind, I started to plan and draw out the event. Organizing a 5K run is not that hard however, I wanted to go full on, and that takes a bit of planning to say the least; I had to set out a course, order finish banners, order a timer, medals, colored powder (and how much would I need for say, 300 runners, bib numbers, prizes, beach balls, tape, I had to arrange police cars, camera crew, I had to arrange portable speakers, a DJ, a fitness guy to do a live warm-up for all the runners, a podium, start line, finish line, drone videographer etc. In other words, time to get the ball rolling and the first thing I had to take care of were the bib numbers and the medals and so I designed them and ordered 350, hoping it would be enough. If it would turn out to be too many, I could always use them for a next 5K.

We’re skipping a few weeks of fun and prep and finally race day

Besides the colored powder, we also added some soy-bean based finger paint to let the crew get creative

After which we did the warm up at the start – complete with DJ – you’ll see the video later – Here is the crew getting ready for their warm-up….

at 10:00 am the crew got underway. The course was 2.5k up and 2.5k down run and with 3 powder stations, the crew went through these stations 6 times….You can imagine the amount of color we went through. I literally had blue and green toes for 2 weeks…..Couldn’t get the stuff off my feet

And after 5K of fun, music and dirt, the crew was rewarded with their well deserved medals

we ended up with 100 runners and had the best day ever. Here are the videos from the various parts of the run