The temperature was right around freezing, which was not all that exciting. We got to the race site at 4AM even though her wave didn't start until 6:20. It was cold and very windy. About 90 minutes before start time, it started sleeting. Yeeeaaaahhhh. That pretty much sucked. There were tens of thousands of us standing around in the road miserable in the dark cold windy sleet waiting to do something.
When we finally got moving, we were both doing well. The course was fun even though we spent more time on the back roads than I would have cared for. Good entertainment along the way with local high school cheerleaders and bands, who I respect tremendously for coming out in the pre-dawn cold. Every mile marker was a neat billboard.
Once we got into the Magic Kingdom, things became a lot more fun with plenty of opportunities to get your picture taken with various Disney characters.
That became our strategy. We’d run for a while, they go stand in line to get our picture taken with another Disney character. It seemed kind of strange doing the stop-start race, but it was fun and after a while, you just kind of gave up on the watch and let yourself have fun. We got some really excellent pictures along the way and I snapped a shot of my wife coming out of the castle, which was great.
The route took us on a tour is the Magic Kingdom and we went through each of the different areas. My favorite, of course, was Adventureland because of Pirates of the Caribbean. We were not disappointed, as there was a whole ship parked on the side of the course with Captain Jack Sparrow, Barbossa, and several other pirates. The line for that photo was particularly long, but there’s no way we were going to miss out on it.
There was a price to be paid for the slow pace, though. Shortly after leaving the Magic Kingdom at around the 7 mile mark, staff members on mountain biked started riding up on us warning that we were behind the minimum pace and if we stayed behind at the 8 mile mark, we’d be picked up and not allowed to finish the race. I was a little nervous, but I also knew that our pace wasn’t the problem. It was all the time spent standing in line for photos. The minimum pace was a generous 16:00 per mile. Even though we were not hauling ass by any means, our running pace was better than the minimum, so I wasn’t too worried. Unfortunately, there were a few other photo ops we had to skip while we got back on pace.
Her foot started bothering her around mile 8, but it hurt worse when she walked, so we kept up a light jog and I glanced at my GPS pace from time to time to make sure we were in the safe zone. Someone told us that at mile 10, they stopped enforcing the cutoffs, which was just as well because she was pretty well finished and we decided to walk the final 5k. We found a woman from Seattle and struck up a conversation with her, which was a nice distraction.
Unfortunately, the final 5k felt like it got colder and the wind picked up as well. I’m sure some of this was our muscles stiffening and our bodies cooling down when we went from jogging to walking. There were also several overpasses to conquer and the rises that didn’t seem like anything special at the beginning of the race were suddenly a little more work to go over.
Nonetheless, we stuck it out and finish we did. The final time was 3:31:37. For me, it was a much harder workout than I planned. I figured it would be a light run while I kept pace with my wife. What I didn’t count on was doing a 3:30 workout the day before my marathon in windy sleet conditions when, in my mind, a light half marathon is a 2:15 run. I spent a lot more time putting out effort than I anticipated.
All in all, it was worth it to cross the finish line with her and get our finisher’s medals together.
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