Note: More media content is available for this story at BrooklynDaily.com.
By Colin Mixson
Brooklyn Daily
There was a colorful crowd of runners at Floyd Bennett Field this weekend.
The Aviator Sports and Events Center hosted this year’s Brooklyn-edition of the popular Color Run event on Saturday and Sunday, where New York’s amateur track stars paid to run, party, and get a little color.
“Every half mile, there were people with very large versions of a ketchup squirt bottles filled with color,” said Long Islander John Pitschi.
The 5k Color Run is starting to become something of a Southern Brooklyn tradition, as families return year after year to beat their times and get pelted with color.
It was Pitschi’s first time at the event, but his wife Jamie had so much fun last year, he let himself get dragged along and found himself having a great time with the family.
Afterwords, he took his wife and kid out for another Southern Brooklyn specialty: Bensonhurst’s L & B Spumoni Gardens.
“We’d like to make it sort of a tradition,” said Pitschi. “We do the run, then we go to a local pizzeria, which is phenomenal.”
The Pitschis were looking for some good family fun, but many of the younger runners stuck around after the race, when the event evolved into a rave-like scene, with music, beer, and billowing puffs of powdered colors, which engulfed the revelers in a surreal fog.
“Everybody had packets of color, and every 15 minutes they’d do a countdown, and then everybody throws there colors into the air,” said participant Priscilla Woods. “It looks smoke, it was pretty cool.”