On Sunday, October 18, Christ Church and St. Joe’s launched their joint spirit week with the “Together for Greenville” Color Run to raise money for St. Anthony’s Catholic School.

From 3:30 to 4:30, teacher volunteers frantically transported eager students from the St. Joe’s campus to CCES in buses. The start line was at Christ Church on the Carson Stadium field. Students, families, friends and faculty all flocked to the field, mingling and anticipating the colorful chaos to come. Once everyone had arrived at CCES, the Blue Belles kick-started the race with a lovely singing of the National Anthem. Then, it was race time!

Various color stations were placed throughout the pathway to St. Joe’s. At each of these stations, teachers chucked fistfuls of colored powder at the runners. At the first station, math teacher Ms. Joseph fearlessly threw blue coloring at everyone passing by her. Meanwhile, Ms. Unger and Ms. Ferguson, along with their sons, manned the yellow station toward the end of the race. As one senior Jack McEvoy explained, “it was a red, yellow, and blue adventure.” However, these stations were only a foreshadowing of the epic event at end of the race: the ultimate color war.

When the last of the runners reached the finish line, all participants gathered on the St. Joe’s field for the final showdown. With each student armed with a full packet of color, the crowd erupted in a cloud of colorful powder so thick that no one could see anything outside a 6-inch radius. The grand intensity of the color cloud caught most students off guard. Freshman Emmy Dickerson exclaimed that she had “so much color in [her] lungs,” and senior Charlie Pruitt admitted he breathed in so much color that his “boogers were blue.”

Not everyone saved the color for the end. Some clever students decided to mix water with the coloring to create a liquid dye to splash on other friends. Others impatiently used up all their color before the color celebration even began. Sophomores Sky Benjamin and Meredith Hovart reflected that they “wish there was more color to go around,” but nevertheless they “enjoyed every bit of the run.”

No matter how different were the students’ experiences and reactions, all can agree that the Color Run was one of the best ways to start off spirit week. As senior class VP Courtney Foster stated, the run was “one of the funnest high school events thus far.” Hopefully, this year’s “Together for Greenville” campaign will continue as a tradition for years to come.