Orange County Fair Fun Run

I usually don’t think it’s too fun to wake up at 4:30 in the morning in order to be somewhere in Costa Mesa at 5 am, but the OC Fair Run is going to have to be an exception. For one thing, it’s not school related, and volunteering at this event meant a free OC Fair Pass, so it was a tradeoff I was willing to take. At early in the morning until the start of the race, volunteers were assigned to help set up for the race. The race itself had already been marked with caution tape, and it was the volunteers’ tasks to help finish setting up and preparing. Other volunteers were assigned to hang up medals that the racers could pick up once finished with the race, and other volunteers were assigned to registration. Once the race began, I was assigned to make sure that people were headed in the right direction and cheer on the runners. The fact that the people who ran across and even said thank you for simply standing there and clapping for them was what made simply standing in one location enjoyable. The people who ran across in the near beginning were very serious about what times they got, and it surprised me how far ahead they were of everyone else, but the people who were to come afterwards seemed to be more lax about the run, and were more focused on having fun. They would shake the prizes that they won in the air in joy, even saying that they were happy to have won such prizes. The duration of the race went by rather quickly, and once everyone had already passed by and moved onto other sections of the fun run, it had already been time to take all the caution tape down. For our service, a fellow Whitney Key Clubber and I were rewarded with the prizes that the runners could have won from the game booths. Once the tape had been taken down, and the water had been recycled into the earth, the rest of the work was mainly helping in cleaning up the area and making sure that everything had been packed up.

The overall experience was definitely one worth waking up so early for; the people I worked with and the people I met during that event made me want to not only attend next year, but attend events similar to the Fun Run. My experiences with this event are only positive, and it’s an event that I encourage all to attend (despite the time you have to wake up to do so).