5K run benefits Painted Turtle summer camp
It was chilly Sunday afternoon, and Adam King was shirtless.
He’d just run 5 kilometers, and he was splattered with paint. He only wished he’d been covered more.
“I hope my coach sees it,” King said of the paint.
The first-year advertising student, who runs on USC’s track team, had just been edged out by Justin Jones, a student in USC’s School of Law, who won by two seconds.
King finished in 17:09, nearly a minute and a half before the third-fastest runner.
King and Jones were two of 150 participants in Delta Zeta’s Painted Turtle Trot race Sunday, the sorority’s first charity 5K, which raised about $3,000, according to Allison Ashforth, the sorority’s philanthropy chair.
King doesn’t have much of a connection with the sorority — he mostly showed up for the chance to run, he said.
But Ashforth and Kara Garrott, a fourth-year biomedical engineering student and the vice president for Delta Zeta’s programs, do. The two first considered holding a color run, in which volunteers throw paint at passing runners, in February.
Still, after months of coordination, Ashforth and Garrott had a nagging fear that the race wouldn’t work out.
“At the event, we looked at each other, and we couldn’t really believe that it actually happened,” said Ashforth, a third-year retail management student. “We’ve been looking forward to it for so long and put so much planning into it.”
The idea worked well with the sorority’s national philanthropy, the Painted Turtle, a summer camp for 7- to 16-year-olds with chronic illnesses, Ashforth said.