Run For Your Lives - Pittsburgh (Butler, PA)
Two weeks on the road is a long time...but it was well worth it. A few days in Kingston visiting my brother, a couple days in Bloomfield (near Sandbanks Provincial Park), three days in Toronto visiting friends and Meg's relatives, four days poking around Niagara Falls being horribly touristy, and then a dash across the border at the Rainbow Bridge for a quick trip to Butler, PA, for Run For Your Lives...if you've never heard of Butler, PA, before, it wouldn't surprise me. It is a small town off US 422 about 40 minutes north of Pittsburgh. It is also very close to Evans City, PA, where George Romero filmed the graveyard sequences for the original Night of the Living Dead (the day after the race we went out and found the Evans City Cemetary and toured around it...things have changed over the last 40 years...). Romero also went to film school in the Pittsburgh, PA, area, but for some reason the folks behind RFYL didn't do anything marketing-wise to link the Butler event with the area's zombie history.
As for the run...it was brutal. Meg finished the Darlington, MD, course (last October) in just over 40 minutes...this one took over an hour. Meg survived. I did not; although I ran it faster than she did, partially because with all my flags gone by the time I entered the last third of the course, I had nothing left to lose and could afford to run at a reasonable pace. The track was uphill for the first half, and then 90% of the zombies and the other 10 obstacles were spread over the remaining half (including two obstacles with live electrical wires). It was also fairly hot and humid, although thankfully not too sunny. And the course was muddy...very, very muddy. Far muddier than the first course in Darlington, and the mud was clay, which meant that it stuck to you. I saw lots of runners missing one or both shoes after they'd been sucked off in the mud pits (of which there were three, plus the muddy water at the bottom of the giant slip-n-slide). Meg lost one of her shoes, but managed to recover it, not that it mattered...a bit of advice: if you are going to do this, wear shoes or some other form of footwear that you don't care about.
Take a look at our before and after pictures, and you'll see just how muddy we got (by the time I came to the last obstacle - an electrifed fence you had to crawl under - they'd flooded the area and turned it into mud as well).
Was it fun? Absolutely! Would I do it again? Yes! In fact, Meg and I are signed up to be zombies at the next event in Toronto on September 22 (technically it is in Orillia), and then we're running in the 2:00pm wave (while a free race is a perk of being a zombie, we won't be timed). We've also developed a theme for our tenure as zombies: Meg is going as Alice from the Resident Evil films, and I will be a nameless Umbrella Corporation Security Officer (in tactical gear, and hopefully with a Go Pro camera to film the chaos).
Click to viewAs for the run...it was brutal. Meg finished the Darlington, MD, course (last October) in just over 40 minutes...this one took over an hour. Meg survived. I did not; although I ran it faster than she did, partially because with all my flags gone by the time I entered the last third of the course, I had nothing left to lose and could afford to run at a reasonable pace. The track was uphill for the first half, and then 90% of the zombies and the other 10 obstacles were spread over the remaining half (including two obstacles with live electrical wires). It was also fairly hot and humid, although thankfully not too sunny. And the course was muddy...very, very muddy. Far muddier than the first course in Darlington, and the mud was clay, which meant that it stuck to you. I saw lots of runners missing one or both shoes after they'd been sucked off in the mud pits (of which there were three, plus the muddy water at the bottom of the giant slip-n-slide). Meg lost one of her shoes, but managed to recover it, not that it mattered...a bit of advice: if you are going to do this, wear shoes or some other form of footwear that you don't care about.
Take a look at our before and after pictures, and you'll see just how muddy we got (by the time I came to the last obstacle - an electrifed fence you had to crawl under - they'd flooded the area and turned it into mud as well).
Was it fun? Absolutely! Would I do it again? Yes! In fact, Meg and I are signed up to be zombies at the next event in Toronto on September 22 (technically it is in Orillia), and then we're running in the 2:00pm wave (while a free race is a perk of being a zombie, we won't be timed). We've also developed a theme for our tenure as zombies: Meg is going as Alice from the Resident Evil films, and I will be a nameless Umbrella Corporation Security Officer (in tactical gear, and hopefully with a Go Pro camera to film the chaos).