Racing Day!

On Saturday morning we woke up astoundingly early and got ourselves ready to run Disney style.

Part of the fun of running at Disney was dressing up. Jerilee went as Rapunzel and looked adorable, and on Saturday my costume was the Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland- it's not all that obvious, and I'm sorry, but measures had to be taken to protect the hideous.I really did love my arm warmers though.

This was the line for the buses to the start.
Look at how many people were running from our hotel alone!

I'm not sure how many people started the half marathon, but it had over 22,000 finishers!

That's a lot of people yall!
I was really impressed with how well organized everything was, and there were porta potties everywhere! Jerilee had a sixth sense and was able to find the one row of porta potties with ZERO lines. Perfect!
So after going to the bathroom and checking bags, you have a twenty minute walk to the start of the race. More like a shuffle, CRAZY crowded.
By the time we made it to the start we were cutting it pretty close to Jerilees starting time. They did a corral start for this race, Jerilee was in corral A because she is awesome and super fast, and I was in corral G because I am the opposite of those things, and my starting time was about a half hour after hers. She made it just in time!
The start was fun, the race announcers were on a little stage with Mickey, Donald and Goofy, and they put up fireworks to signal the start of each corral/wave.

Finally, I can see the starting line!

This is the course map for the half marathon. The stretches between Epcot and the Magic Kingdom felt a lot longer than I thought they would, but running through the parks was awesome!

There were SO many people wearing fun costumes, but one thing I hadn't expected was men dressed as princesses and fairies. That was pretty amusing, but what was even more amusing was seeing a row of them lined up on the side of the course from time to time, oh you know, just peeing into the bushes.
Probably good that the picture is so blurry?

Can I just take a minute or two to talk about how NOT prepared I was for these races? I knew that going into it, and if you read my running blog then you knew it too. I was way excited for Goofy, but I just couldn't muster any motivation when it came to actually running to prepare.
15 miles on Halloween was the longest run I had under my belt since summertime, and while did get in some small mileage runs, my last one was a seven miler a few days before Christmas.

With that in mind, and knowing I'd be out running again the next day I decided to go with a run four minutes, walk one minute rhythm. It went pretty well, slow and steady, and I think I kept it up for most of the race. There were a few times when I happened to be at a water station and ended up walking through one of the four minute segments but for the most part that's what I did.

Tomorrow Land!
Somewhere between miles 5 and 6 I think

Frontier Land!

I didn't get many fun pictures during the half because I wanted to stick with my run/walk thing so I only pulled out my phone during the walking segments. If you read Jerilees blog though, you'll see that Disney had all sorts of fun characters there cheering us on and taking pictures with people who wanted to.
I didn't stop for any character pictures because by the time I got to them, they all had LOOOONG lines, and I wasn't sure how close I would come to the time limit to finish, and didn't want to risk it.

This was around mile ten I think? You'd probably have to click the picture and make it bigger to really see, I just wanted to show how BIG this crowd was! This sea of people were behind me in the race and there was an identical one in front of me.

Almost there! Running back through Epcot.

Finished!!!

I love my Donald medal!

I ended up finishing at 2:53:58, NOT great, but again, I was just SO unprepared, and I was way ahead of the cut off time, so at least there's that:)

Other than heading back to Downtown Disney for some dinner that evening, we just took it easy the rest of that day to rest up for the big one the next day.