Here I go, volunteering again!

Back of my volunteer t-shirt

This weekend was another one filled with fun and a day of volunteering, the race this weekend was Pretty Muddy Chicago.  I signed up back in April or May to volunteer at this one after I was given a bit of a hard time for volunteering at Dirty Girl and not at Pretty Muddy, so I went online and filled out the volunteer info and added Pretty Muddy to my list.

The calm before the race!

Ready for all the participants!

There had been a few times over the past week that I rethought volunteering, the gig was almost 2 hours south outside Chicago and I wasn’t sure the drive was worth it, but when the opportunity to head to the city Friday afternoon came up I decided why not volunteer, I know how great I feel after a day of volunteering and I didn’t have other Saturday plans so why not.

Perfect day for a mud run

I arrived super early, 6:15am to volunteer, got my shirt, finally met Meg.  Meg and I had been emailing a bit about volunteering so it was so nice to put a face with a name.  Then I headed off to my first job of the day, gear check.  I have never worked gear check before. It was busy and crazy with all the bags the ladies were dropping off.  I felt like I couldn’t count and kept looking for the numbers to keep everything in order, we were in a tight space but managed to get bags in and out no problem.  I was at gear check for several hours, then I took a short break, ate some food (there were 3 food trucks so I picked one and had a bite) and said hi to a couple people I knew on the production/setup crew.

each participant earned this medal, way better than a t-shirt I think!

Then I went back to Meg to get reassigned, I was sent over to merchandise to work with Jenni, I had a blast.  I was able to sell, sell, sell along with help women pick out the perfect souvenir for the day.  I was able to chat with so many women and made a bunch of them smile big, a lot had just accomplished their very first 5k, to me they are very brave choosing a mud run for their first run, I used to have a hard enough time running 3 miles, let alone 3 miles plus muddy obstacles.  I never got to check out the whole course, guess I should have walked around a bit more, next time I’ll have to go hang out at some of the obstacles and watch a bit more of the race.

New shirt I’ll be sporting, thanks for an awesome volunteer gig!

The staff for Pretty Muddy was great, I even stayed to help with tear down, chatted with the staff and said hi to a few of the guys from Evolve Concepts that I knew, wasn’t sure they would remember me, but they did, so it was really nice to see and chat with some of them.  All in all it was another really fun day volunteering, some days I wish I could do stuff like that for my day to day job, but I’m not sure I’d like all the travel, but I know I love the race atmosphere and really feel at home there. It’s fun going from corporate world to mud run/race world, I’ve met so so many awesome people and made some great friends and memories along the way.