I started off on car park marshalling while Ashleigh helped on registration for runners and walkers. It wasn’t long before it was time to head to our colour stations ready for the start. I jumped at the chance to be plant station 1 which meant we got to throw paint not once, not twice, but three times as it was two laps and we then moved to the finish arch. Now it took a bit of practise to see how much paint was needed per cup to get the best paint to people ratio. There were definitely some times with too much paint or person! I ended up chief paint police on the finish as we descended into anarchy with children pinching the paint. I had to ration it out to make sure we had enough left for all the finishes. Ashleigh had no such problems though as they chucked all their paint on the first lap. Job done!! We had so much fun and so did the participants. Some of them went for extra laps as they were having so much fun. We can’t wait for this event to come around again. It wasn’t long before it was all over and we were tidying up and trying to get ourselves back to our usual colour!

Steph was assigned to distributing numbers for the 5k while I was in charge of women’s and kids T-shirts. There were more than 1000 runners expected and 300 t-shirts to give out. There was still time to grab our complimentary volunteer burger before we headed out to our marshal positions. They were well needed to sustain our cheering through the 5k and 10k which was two laps. Steph was positioned for her road closure and Ellie ran down to her road closure on the parallel road. Fortunately we didn’t have too many issues with cars trying to come through and lots of residents came out to cheer alongside us. Great to see Abby smashing out a new 5k PB and lots of other runners from local groups enjoying this local race. I didn’t manage to spot everyone but they certainly heard me with my cowbell! We look forward to being back next year.