Gorilla Ice Ice Baby

Last weekend I played the role of awesome, supportive husband when I ignored my own race goals and my marathon training schedule and ran the Denver Half Marathon with my wife, pacing her and catering to her every need. This weekend was payback as I sent her all over town looking for items to complete my Gorilla Ice costume for the Denver Gorilla Run and then told her that I didn’t even like most of them. I then proceeded to get gorilla fur all over the house (seriously, that thing was shedding like a yeti vacationing in the Caribbean), and finally made her drag two tired little boys all around Denver so they could cheer for me.

The race was roughly 3.6 miles long and I had decided that I would try to take it easy on this run, mostly because I would be wearing a gorilla suit, but also because I was still hoping to get my 15 mile long run in. I ended up finishing somewhere around 36:22 with an average pace just north of 10 minute miles. It was a little slower than I had hoped for, but the effort that I put forth felt more like I had been running a 5K close to an all out pace. I kept my mask on for the first mile and then alternated between perching it on top of my head and pulling it back down over my face when I saw an official photographer. I didn’t feel at all guilty for not wearing the mask the whole way because there were some people that didn’t even wear it for the first tenth of a mile while others ran with their gorilla costumes stripped down to their waists. It was hot. The temperature was in the 70s and I was so hot that my teeth were even sweating.

At one point in the race we were forced to stop before crossing a busy street that had not been closed to traffic. There were a couple of traffic cops directing traffic and they stopped a group of us for at least a minute, normally I would have been upset about this, but this was a fun run for charity and at the time the forced break was welcome.

All in all it was a fun event. I managed to make a complete fool of myself as you will see in the video below and I got to meet up with Simon from RunColo who took 2nd place overall. If you want to know how it feels to be competitive then I recommend reading his account of the race. Congrats Simon!

The video below is me dressed up as Gorilla Ice dancing to, what else, Ice Ice Baby. I figured if I was going to be Gorilla Ice then I should at least try some dance moves. Steve in a Speedo has on a couple of occasions posted videos of himself dancing as the Grim Reaper and he inspired me to give it a try. Perhaps in the future I’ll challenge Steve to a virtual dance off (challenging him to a foot race is out of the question, he’s fast) because the only thing lamer than a dance off, is a virtual dance off between two bloggers.

Crank up the volume and bask in the beautiful sounds of Vanilla Ice accompanied by the eye-gouge-inducing dance moves of Gorilla Ice. A couple of things to watch for: At the 46 second mark you can see me very nearly roll my right ankle, that would have been an embarrassing way to injure myself. At the 2:30 mark you’ll see Simon cruise by in a Hawaiian shirt and an orange headband.

High quality version available at YouTube.