Welcome to Santa Claus, IL… um, I mean the Santa Rotary run.
About 5 years ago, one of my guides mentioned this race in Arlington Heights. I did it in 2019 for the first time, and had so much fun. It’s become one of my standard winter races at this point.
For 2022’s race, you couldn’t try the suits on (due to the pandemic), so I had to guess on sizing. Even though I had shrunk a bit at that point, I still went with the same size as in the past since I had to guess. That was a bad choice, as I’ll explain later. [For reference, the Santa suit was over an Under Armour base layer and Saucony running pants / t-shirt.]
As I’ve mentioned in the past, pacing was a concern. So Natalie made sure that we kept things fairly slow for mile 1, and started to negative split from there. Mile 1 went great, and mile 2 was decent. And then the wardrobe malfunctions began…
When we started running at a decent pace for the final mile, first the Santa pants started coming down. After stopping to fix them twice, I gave up and stripped them off. However, that didn’t stop the issue. The running pants were also too large, and started coming off as we ran.
While I haven’t found them, I am certain that there are some very ‘interesting’ photos of us coming into the finish line with me holding up the running pants so that I’m decent. Yes, I did have on the UA tights, but I didn’t want it to get to that level…
Even with the wardrobe challenges, I still felt that it was a solid race and a great way to end the 2022 running season!
