The Prettiest 5K

The XTERRA Trail Running World Championships is a half marathon through the normally-closed-to-trail-running Kualoa Ranch.  It turns out they also have a 5K race (among other activities) so on a whim we decided to register.  We don't do much trail running so we thought it might be a nice challenge.  And Kualoa Ranch is extremely picturesque and has been the film site for Lost, 50 First Dates, Jurassic Park, among many others.  (Journey 2:  The Mysterious Island is currently filming there.)

We got our okoles (tushes) up early Sunday morning to join 1498 others in the middle of a field/cow pasture (watch your step!).










As with any race there's always a group making a statement.  These guys ran the 21K (half marathon) with gas masks to raise awareness for military service members injured in Iraq and Afghanistan.

At the start line

The trail wasn't actually too tough and not really trail-y either.  We'd call it a gravel path/road with one tiny "off road" section.  The 5K had two longs hills leading up to mile one.

The hill started off innocent but after awhile it felt like it would never crest.

If these people turned around they would have glimpsed a nice ocean view!

 

Huts that are either to demonstrate old Hawaiian homes and/or for a film site.

A making his way up a hill.

Here's R with one turn left before the finish chute.  She was very confused here because she thought there was at least 1.5 miles left to go.  Turns out a 5K isn't that far when the coupla hills were at the beginning. 

Finishing times and oranges in hand!

The valley can hold quite a large number of cars!

Paul Mitchell was cutting hair on site to benefit the Challenged Athlete Foundation.

After hanging out in the beautiful valley we changed into swimsuits and proceeded along the Windward coast to a very quiet strip of beach on the side of the road.  We just parked the car and hopped out to set our blanket under a tree.  We hadn't been on this stretch of beach so we enjoyed walking up and down the coastline finding fun things like sea glass, crabs, and coconuts firmly stuck in the sand.

After enough hanging around on the beach we set our sites on Fumi's Shrimp Truck since we hadn't been to this shrimp truck yet.  En route we detoured to La'ie Point to see the island with a hole in the middle.  There are five small islands scattered offshore said to be created by a fight between a giant mo'o (lizard) and Kana, a legendary warrior, when Kana chopped the mo'o's head into five pieces and flung them into the ocean.  (Don't feel sad for the mo'o; he had been killing anyone who came close to his island.)  The hole in this island was caused when the ocean literally crashed through the island during the April 1, 1946 tsunami.

At this point we're quite close to the North Shore so we stopped to check out if there were any turtles at "turtle beach".

Yep. There were four chillin'.  Well, three were chillin'; one was biting another's shell.  (Turns out this is not a normal behavior.  A long-time turtle-watching volunteer says she had never seen that before.)

The other bonus to making it to the North Shore was that we were able to catch a sunset, something we can't see from our east-facing abode.