See Diva Run

On December 1, Mr Diva and I ran the Las Vegas Great Santa Run 5K with our friends from the LVM21 club. Imagine our embarrassment when everyone else was in the same outfit!

This race is a fund raiser for Opportunity Village, a charity that provides services to devlopmentally disabled adults. It is also an attempt to set the Guinness World Record for the number of Santas gathered in one place. This is the third year for the race, and the second year that we participated. Similar events are held in Liverpool, England and Derry, Northern Ireland. The record was held by Liverpool, and they made a good effort to defend it with more than 6,000 participants at their last race. Too bad for them, Las Vegas had 7,269! We are the champions my friend, but it may not last for long as the Derry is trying to recruit 10,001 Santas for their event.

While most of the group elected to participate in the 1 mile walk, we jogged the 5K. A Santa costume does little to improve the speed of the runner. There might have been someone who put in a serious running effort, but most everyone that we saw was jogging or walking. Unlike other races where the bib number is used to keep track of your finish time, here the bib number is to verify your participation for the Guinness people. They don’t keep track of your time, but I brought my iPod, and started the workout as we crossed the starting line, and ended it when we crossed the finish line. Our time was 37:36, which is our Santa costume PR We also had a lot of fun, and were delighted to be part of the record.

For more information about the Las Vegas Great Santa Run, visit the Opportunity Village web site.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 8th, 2007 at 7:02 pm and is filed under Race Reports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.