Jilted Bride Wears Wedding Dress in 5K Marathon
— -- Formal dresses aren’t the typical attire for running a 5k.
For Kilee Manulak, participating in a color run 5k in her bright white wedding dress was a way to forget about a broken engagement.
Manulak had been dating her fiancé for over four years, but a week before the couple’s wedding day, he ended it all over a text message. Manulak’s friends and family didn’t let her get down on herself. A friend sent her the registration link to the Color Fun Fest 5k in Tampa Bay, Fla., where runners get doused with colored powder throughout the course of the race. When Manulak was registering for the race, something in her head clicked.
“I opened the link and everyone in the pictures was dressed in white,” said Manulak. “I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I should do this in my dress!’”
Manulak didn’t ask her bridesmaids to wear their dresses at the race, but they insisted on it. She said she wasn’t nervous about trashing her wedding dress.
“I detached myself from the dress," she said. "It was no longer that beautiful white dress to me. It was no longer going to be worn, now [the dress] is about friendship and support.”
Manulak's dress will be cleaned and donated to someone else, and she hopes that her resilience will empower other people who are in a similar situation.
