That’s right. Two-time! Two-time! Zombie run winnar!
So while I nurse my sore limbs and achy body parts, let me reminisce about the Atlanta chapter of the zombie run. Despite my trepidations going into the event, I can pretty easily say that I had a good of time as I did in Maryland, despite my reluctance up there too. If anything, I would venture to say that it was more fun than the first, for a myriad of reasoning.
Without much argument, the Atlanta zombie run was executed a million times better than the Maryland one. Granted, the Maryland zombie run back in October had the dubious task of being the inaugural event in which the bar was set, and all its failures and successes were what all the other chapters were to build off of, but the parking debacle and the tedious shuttling really, really hurt it badly. Whether it was superior planning or luck of the draw, Georgia’s venue for the event was far superior in the fact that there was plenty of on-site parking and no shuttles were necessary, and the local police appeared to be in cooperation and ready to deal with the traffic jams that never happened, probably because of the tornadoes or threat of them that ripped through the state the night before.
In fact, kind of the exact opposite happened for my company and I this time around. Whereas in Maryland, my boy cheetos and I were screwed by the traffic, and didn’t get to run until 3:30 p.m., this time we arrived extremely early, in expectations for catastrophic traffic, and in the end, we ended up running at 12:00 p.m., instead of our scheduled 1:00 p.m. heat.
But what really hurt the Atlanta zombie run, wasn’t really any fault of the event at all; simply, it was Mother Nature being a royal cunt and dropping the sky and next week’s sky on the state in the span of 24 hours, creating the biggest pit of mud since the Chilean mud slides. Needless to say, any sort of jogging or running was mostly out of the question, as the entire race course was decimated into a 3.1 trail of mud, mud and more mud. Slippery mud, sticky mud that could, and did actually engulf shoes off of peoples’ feet, trick mud, and mud that looked like muddy water but was actually just more mud.
I’m not joking when I say that there was not a single step taken once arriving onto the event grounds, that was not a muddy one. I’m also not joking when I say that there was not a single step taken on the entire race course that was not in mud, or something slathered and coated in mud. Red Georgia clay became our skin tones very early on, and I declared us the Atlanta Redcorns at some point, which nobody but me found amusement in.
Needless to say, any aspirations of nailing down a good time were pretty much hopes and dreams. I’m actually very curious to see what the top runners of the day managed to get, let alone stay alive. It took a 38 minute-ish time for me to place within the top 1,500 survivors in Maryland, but I have to bet that with the conditions of the Georgia course, that would be good enough to place like top 100. So with how shitty the entire course was going to be, essentially, almost the whole thing was walked. I’m fairly certain that the trek took my friends and I well over an hour.
While we were walking to the grounds, finished runners heeded their advice and imparted condemning words, to which stood out the most was the fact that within the first three and a half hours worth of heats, supposedly only 21 people survived; meaning 21 people who managed to secure at least one flag on their persons throughout the duration of the race. So pretty much, we were told that we were fucked. Naturally, I refused to believe this, since I have already beaten the game before.
To cut to the chase, out of our entire group of five, we all survived. We all have our stories about how it happened, but when we all crossed the finish line, we all still had flag(s), or “first aid,” aka the bonus flags that prevents you from “dying.”
Later on, I ended up hearing that through hearsay, there was a lot of accusations that anyone who won at all was likely cheating, but let’s be fair here, the rules do have a lot of holes, and there is a lot of circumstantial things that happen that lead to some liberal interpretations of what is right and wrong. In other words, I don’t really give a flying fuck that people thought other people were cheating, because I crossed the finish line with flags intact.
Naturally, my story is probably the most controversial of them all, since I already admitted that I wouldn’t hesitate to use underhanded tactics to survive, because shit, in a real zombie apocalypse, one would go to almost any lengths to guarantee survival. But let’s just say, I took full advantage of my surroundings and conditions, and then went to great lengths to assist my fellow companions.
Meaning, I wore the same long-length shirt I wore back in Maryland, and had it conveniently over my flags. I took a dive early on in the race, which pretty much gave me the coat of Georgia Red Clay that everyone else would end up wearing throughout the course of the day, but the inadvertent benefit to such is that aside from your shoes, pants and shirt, it also obscures your flags. And then here’s the kicker – on the path, I stumbled upon a discarded flag belt, empty of all remaining flags. I didn’t hesitate to rip that bitch off the ground, and immediately drape it across my waist, over my shirt. Nothing in the rules says I couldn’t utilize what others have discarded.
Suddenly, I now appear to be dead. As evidenced in all forms of zombie storytelling, zombies don’t attack their own. With no visible flags, but instead a visible belt devoid of all flags, I was invisible to the zombies…
Except, when I was getting right up their grills, and setting picks and screens so that my companions could run safely by attacking zombies. I wasn’t touching any zombies, so I wasn’t breaking any rules there. I was just conveniently getting in the way of their optimal paths of pursuit of those I was running with, and if I happened to suddenly feel like running to pace them, or slow down when they try to adjust, so be it.
I actually had way more fun being the lineman for some of my friends, and running interference against the zombies. One particular instance saw me interfering with no less than seven zombies as they pursued Tomás, and when he bit it in the mud, I cockblocked the fuck out of three of them by picking him up and using my body as the shield he needed to avoid death.
Eventually, even I began to feel a little guilty at the deception I was putting on, but as I said, I’m not above exploiting the lack of a rule for my own survival. Regardless, I shed the dead belt in the last half mile, and put the rest on the line with the knowledge that the worst waves were right before the finish. And sure enough, the largest wave of zombies was the last one, in which I built up a full head of steam, and went full speed ahead. I got past one sub-wave, and completely bit it in the mud at a sudden hairpin corner; I actually heard one of the chick zombies say “ooh” at my misfortune, and she and two others charged. I got to my feet fairly expediently in spite of the slippery mud everywhere, but it also worked to my advantage as well, since the zombies had to trudge through it too. I ran at them, instead of away from them, and their momentum pretty much carried them way beyond reach as I more or less toro’d them and took off on my merry way.
Finishing the race was a monumental relief, since I knew what aches and pains were going to happen from the trek of wading through an endless stream of mud. I’ll give the Maryland zombie run some credit; as archaic and crappy it was in their own right, their three hoses to be shared by thousands was a lot more efficient manner of clean-up than the water truck and the piss-stream like “shower” stall set up in Georgia. Needless to say, I still have a garbage bag full of muddy wet clothes that need to be washed, probably twice, to actually clean them up.
But anyway, as I said, my friends and I all survived. I enjoy the fact that my method of cockblocking contributed to the survival of some of my friends, and I did my best to be a tank and shield. I still question whether or not I want to partake in this event in the future, or if I want to be a zombie another time around. But for what it’s worth, and no disrespect to cheetos, as I am grateful for his companionship and self-sacrifice in Maryland, but I think this time around was better. The event was pulled off better, I had a nice little group with me, and I guess since I had a clearer understanding of what to expect, I was able to pick and choose my fun and amusement a bit better.
And to anyone who has read this, and simply thinks I’m a lowly cheater for my actions, I simply rebut the following:
Uncle Eddie says it’s okay to cheat to win.
