I find it interesting how the ability to sleep in late declines with age. Now that my daughter is old enough to not require our services first thing in the morning I am incapable, it seems, of sleeping much past 7am. Well, until the day of the race, that is!
After staying out as late as we could at the
MNSSHP, we slept until...get this....11:15!!!
Holy cow! Our intent that morning had been to go the the breakfast buffet (or ala cart, who knows) at the Swan's Garden Grove. Yeah, totally slept thru that! And we were worried that we'd be up early as we were able to hear a baby thru the wall at 1am. Now, the baby was cooing and making happy noises, but still, noise is noise. But no...the baby slept in too, I guess.
We even slept thru our phones buzzing as Mindy was texting me. I must have put it on some clothing to decrease the noise. Mindy and Jim had arrived the night before and got to their hotel around midnight, I think. They got a decent rate at All Star Music, I think, which was a host hotel, important for the fact that Mindy had purchased tickets so they could come cheer us on that evening!! Mindy will chime in to give you her details if she see fit, but they ended up at Downtown Disney for some shopping and lunch, then went to Wide World of Sports to pick up their tickets and some Disney swag. There's a race in their future..........
Sean and I needed food. We'd had dinner at Pecos Bills, and while Sean had a massive burger and fries, I, she who has tummy running issues, was trying to stick to "normal" consumption and had a chicken wrap. Incidentally, this was pretty good. I'd expected the wrap to be drenched in creamy dressing of some sort, but it wasn't! Just chicken, lettuce, and tomatoes. I used the toppings bar and added pepperoccinis, grilled onions, and mushrooms! Yum! So in wandering around, we realized that we were a bit limited on the Boardwalk, and ended up at the ESPN club. Which, surprisingly, was quite good! Not greasy in any way! I had a chicken sandwich on foccicia and Sean had a roast beef sandwich of some sort. Ok, hungry beast quelled, we needed to head over to International Gateway to pick up our wine. However, we didn't want to waste a park admission going in there.....so we asked one of the gate attendants how they could help us.....and let's just say she lacked the Disney standard. We caught the attention of one of the store employees that was dealing with the
stroller rentals, and she more than helpfully got our package! So, wine returned to the room, we decided that as we'd had no shopping opportunity the evening before, we headed over to the MK so as to wander in and out of the shops on Main Street! This was definitely an adult activity! How nice to take your time, not being pulled to one thing or another! It didn't matter that we were primarily shopping for our daughter anyway, it was just nice to take our time and enjoy the details!
Before we left, I asked Ashleigh what she'd like for our trip. Without much hesitation, she wanted something with Stitch or Jack Skellington. Ok. We found a cute black and purple Jack t-shirt easily since all the Nightmare stuff was out for Halloween. Stitch, however, was another matter. All I could find were plushes. That child has more plushes that she has space to put them. No WAY I was going to buy one, especially as it wasn't one of the small ones.....it was at least 16" long! Sigh. So we held off hoping to find something later on in our trip. We were kind of wanting some ice cream, but the line was out the door and down Main Street a ways, so we left the park and headed back to the room to rest our feet.
Ahhhhhh......Air conditioning and football! But after a while, we knew that we'd need to fuel up a bit. We decided to try out the Fountain at the Dolphin.....and while we split a salad, both of us were still really craving ice cream, and as I knew I wouldn't really eat after the race (I know, I should to help with muscle recovery, but I have a really hard time doing so...), I figured that a wee bit of ice cream would be good, right?? Here's the pic I texted Mindy:
Sean had rocky road, I had a caramel coffee something or other. Very tasty! And, as it had been really hot, we did take the time to guzzle water to pre-hydrate, as we'd been doing for the last few days.
Race instructions asked us to be on a bus by 8 in order to be in a corral by 9:15. Uh, ok. That seems excessive, but not having done a Disney race, we figured we'd follow their advice. So the plan was to leave the room about 7:30 and walk over tot he Boardwalk to catch a bus. Knowing that we'd be out very late again, we got out our running gear and clothing for the next day, and packed up the luggage in preparation for heading to the Port. Wine in carryon, along with swimsuit and coverup; all the toiletries would be thrown in there as well. We left the big case open, knowing that our nasty, sweaty running stuff would need to be in a plastic bag and crammed in later that night.
I have to say that while their estimation of when we "needed" to be on a bus was waaaaaayyyyyy too early, the transportation to the race was efficient. We walked on a bus and were whisked off the barely 1 mile to the parking lot somewhere at Hollywood Studios. Um, ok, I suppose had I not been saving my feet that this would have been a very easy walk...if fact, they overshot the bag drop off spot by about 1/4 mile and we had to backtrack. Sean and I used 1 of the bags they gave us and had prepared dry clothing for later on. That dropped off, it was still just before 8pm. The race didn't start until 10! They had a stage set up with a DJ(dressed in a ToT uniform!) hosting a dance party a ways away from the corrals. Not wanting to be on our feet, we headed to the corral and found a seat.
I believe that the official # of registered runners was about 10,000. The corrals were broken into groups of 2500. So while we were there early and could get an easy seat along a fenceline away from the general crowd, imagine how that was for those that got there late! Here's Sean while we were waiting:
There were lots of portalets IN our corral (corral A)...the only corral to have them! Not sure why that was, though. There were a lot more outside our corral, but it seems like poor planning on Disney's part. I'd be interested to hear the opinion of someone in one of the other 3 corrals.
So, if you're not a runner, I can imagine you asking "what the heck is a corral?". When you register for a race, you can submit a time from a timed race so as to get you in a faster corral, or, you can submit an estimated time that you think you might finish the race in. I had an official 1/2 marathon time I submitted, and put down that I figured I'd finish in 1:45:00. I figured there would be things to see and characters to stop for and that this would be a generous estimation. Sean insisted that he'd run with me, though he is, by far, a faster runner than I. Having been dead last in a 10k a few years ago, I'm simply glad to be middle of the pack. I once thought I'd never run again, so I'm happy just to be ABLE to run. Sean is a born competitor. Hates having people pass him. Remember this.
So right was I was thinking I might zip over to the portalet one more time (getting a bit nervous), they get us up and Moooooooooooove us (get it..like a cow? herding us?) to the starting line. This, my friends, was quite a long walk. But, we were pretty close to the starting area:
Mindy was texting me at this point wondering where we were and at some point she did find the 2 of us, but it was so loud I couldn't hear her yelling at us!! So she got to see us start off! Each corral got a fireworks start, but not knowing this, I didn't get any pics
. They were pretty, though!
So here I need to mention the weather. It was 80 degrees. At 10 pm.
And really, really humid. We live closer to Canada than we do to Seattle, and it rarely gets to 80, let alone be 80 and that stinkin' humid. I was sweating before we started the race! The other thing that's important here is that in spite of being what I consider to be fairly fit and athletic, I have an abnormally high heart rate. Resting is usually high 80's. Ok, what ever, not an issue. I keep hydrated by running with a hydration pack (love this thing!). eUntil I hit the 180 range, which is where I start to feel symptomatically short of breath and generally like crap. It took me 33 minutes to achieve a rate of 185, at which time I announced to Sean that I needed to walk to slow it down. Sean, not ever having experienced this sensation or heart rate, was annoyed. I will spare you the finer details, but we've agreed never to run together in a race ever again. Kept telling him to go ahead. Wouldn't listen. I ended up walking 6 times, with the ONLY picture stop to be this:
We were running thru the WWoS baseball field and caught ourselves on the jumbotron! Very cool! I heard that there was intermittently a green screen there that would somehow show the runners coming out of the ToT, but did not witness this myself. In addition, another really cool thing there was that one of the Casey's Corner cast members was there wearing his baseball duds. Pretty neat!
Mindy and Jim had made their way to HS, and Mindy said she saw us run by, but Jim had turned his head and missed the photo op
. We ran thru a LOT of HS. Must have been at least a mile....I never knew how much park you could actually cover there! But, at least it was interesting to look at and kept the fatigue at bay for a bit. The course overall was a bit sparse on entertainment, IMO. My (our) finish time was 1:49:15. Yikes. Over shot my "generous" estimation a bit, eh? But, we finished:
And our medals (the elevator moves up and down...):
As you cross the finish lie, you get your medals, then continue walking, get water or powerade (or both), a banana, a snack box, keep walking, hit the bathroom, keep walking, walk some more...get the idea? I get why...it really kept the bottle neck to a minimum, and I can imagine that it might get very crowded later as the other corrals and walkers that were grouped together came across the finish line. But the bag pick up was off in no-man's land (Sean finally went and got it), as I waited with Mindy and Jim. They had tents for us to change in, but those things were bloody saunas! It was hard enough to peel off the sweaty clothes, but then you had to pull dry ones over your sweaty self. Phew!
There was a ton of stuff open, but after doing a few attractions, we were shot. The feet were sore, and neither of us brought another pair to change into. I was walking around in my running shoes with the laces wide open! So off to the busses and back to the room for a well-deserved shower! Again, the bus transportation was very efficient. Got off at the Boardwalk again and walked over to the Swan. A security guy asked us what we were doing, as apparently the Boardwalk area was closed and usually no one could/should be there. He didn't give us any trouble though, when we explained what we were doing. In fact, I'm surprised he asked at all. A) we looked like runners and B), the swan and dolphin were sold out that night so there was no way we were the first to come by here....
Anyway, we set an alarm for 8 as our plans were to be at ASM to pick Jim and Mindy up at 9. Ug. That was early....