The BolderBoulder 10K is the epitome of a fun run. Nearly 50,000 participants (many in costume) weave through neighborhood streets, passing hula dancers, an Elvis impersonator, and bacon handouts along the way. But the Cedar Avenue slip-and-slide might be the route’s most anticipated attraction.

If you participate in the 45th edition of the race this Memorial Day, don’t forget to splash on the lawn of Cathy and Bryan Fluegel, who have rolled out the wet carpet in their front yard for nearly 20 years.

5280 May 2025
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Editor’s note: The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Cathy Fluegel: Over on 19th Street, around 2006, there was a house where people were running up a driveway and sliding down this little grassy spot where the homeowner put out a sprinkler. I went home and told Bryan, “Let’s put out our slip-and-slide.” So many people came over that the slide got destroyed in 10 minutes.

Bryan Fluegel: It became so popular, so fast. People were just lining up.

Cathy: We used a pool liner after that. Then we tried some kind of industrial plastic. Some years, it would last to the very end, and some years, it’d get a big hole. We’d have to shut it down so nobody got hurt.

Bryan: We had a friend who saw the problem. He’s a commercial architect, and he had a contact who makes this very strong plastic called vapor barrier that goes under concrete, and it gets very slick when it’s wet.

Cathy: And this company is into it. They love the race, so they’re like, “Here’s a giant roll of the stuff.” It’s super heavy, weighs probably a couple hundred pounds. Every year, we haul it out, cut off a 20-foot piece, and put a carpet pad underneath the plastic.

Bryan: We drive it into the ground with some rebar and have PVC pipes on either side.

Cathy: [To Bryan] You’re going to give away trade secrets. We can’t give away our engineering designs to 5280.

Bryan: But it lasts.

Cathy: As the weather gets nicer, and we’re setting up, people will ride their bikes past the house. They’ll say, “You’re the slip-and-slide house!” They thank us and ask us if we’re doing it again, and we’re like, “We got you!” That’s the stuff that makes me feel good.

Bryan: I’ll walk up the street and see this big line of people waiting, all for just a couple of seconds on the slide. It’s surreal. We have people in our yard we don’t know. Cathy and I have walked into our house and there were strangers using our bathroom.

Cathy: That’s when we asked BolderBoulder to bring us four portable toilets. We probably could use 10 of them.

Bryan: We hear about it from strangers all the time. I was at an out-of-state business meeting, and I was talking to some random person. The guy said he hit the slide the last time he ran the BolderBoulder.

Cathy: We had someone ask, “Do you know the slip-and-slide house?” And we’re like, “Bitch, we are the slip-and-slide house.” Our party runs itself. Everyone loves Bryan’s playlist. We see our friends from when we were growing up, and those people bring their kids…. I’ve never slid on it. I think I have performance anxiety. In my mind, I’d do this beautiful baseball slide, but I don’t know how to do that.

Bryan: We critique people.

Cathy: There are people who fail really badly. We see belly flops, or the guys who hit the ground and just don’t slide.

Bryan: At the end of the day, all that water gets pushed to the end and it turns into a big mud pit.

Cathy: Some years, we’ve resodded sections of the lawn. Other times, the grass comes back after a few weeks.

Bryan: It’s like a cost-benefit analysis. We’re giving something to the community. It’s only a couple hundred bucks for us, so who cares?

Cathy: Right now, we really enjoy it. We enjoy our friends and our family, and I like that we can orchestrate this thing. We just want to be present in that moment, sharing this with the people we love. There’s beer, some plastic, and lots of fun. Everyone feels good. Everyone’s happy to be here. For us, we feel so humbled that people want to be around us. This is what the idea of a community is all about.