Where's Santa!?

This past Saturday, December 1st, Vegas had another Santa Run, which is a benefit for Opportunity Village. They were also trying to break a world record for number of people gathered dressed as Santa so along with your registration fee you got a Santa suit. Well I saw people with runner / walker tags that numbered over 11,000 and before the run they announced that they had gotten about 8,000 people registered (and people could also register after the run / walk). At 8,000 I believe the record was already shattered (held by Liverpool, England, but they were also doing another run this year). I haven't seen any official numbers yet, but as you can see there was a sea of red down on Fremont Street this past Saturday.
Everyone looked to be having a fun time, but the beginning of the run / walk could have been orgainized better as it was really hard to get out of the pack if you weren't at the very front. I was kind of surprised to find out that this run wasn't timed like all the other 5k's (3.1 miles) held around town. Oh well, the main objective was to raise a lot of money for Opportunity Village and have fun. I'm also guessing that maybe this event wasn't timed, rather it also just served as a warm up for people that were running in the Las Vegas Marathon which was on Sunday.
As you can imagine it was cool to see so many people dressed as Santa (there was even dogs dressed as Santa - cats wouldn't put up with that!). I wasn't with this group, but they seemed fairly harmless.
And the 5k Santa Run is about to start (15 minutes late)! Wow, being in a crowd this huge reminded me of the San Diego Comic-Con!



Pictured with me is my friend Man (pronounced "mon" as in "Mon-El" and yes that's the correct spelling except the letter "a" should have those two little dots, called umlauts, above it). This is only Man's second 5k and I think if she keeps at it she'll have a better time than me before too long (this year I've run 5k's in about 24 minutes, which is about a 7 minute something mile, but I've run it in as fast as 21.18 minutes)! As you can see from our Santa suits (or lack of) the run really plays havok with the ability of wearing the whole outfit the entire time!