CherieFran
Mouseketeer
- Joined
- Mar 29, 2016
Day 3 – Sunday, November 6 – Wine & Dine Half Marathon
With my 6:30 pm bedtime, I managed a glorious 8.5 hours of sleep. Daylight savings time ended overnight, which gave an extra hour of sleep! I woke up about 2 am (the second 2 am) and rested/dozed a little more until my alarm went off at 3. I got myself prepped, ate the banana I had saved from the 10K the day before and headed out to the bus at about 3:40.
I boarded the bus right away. We stopped at a few of the Riverside stops until the standing room on the bus was filled (hopefully they were sending more buses to Riverside as we didn’t complete the loop). We arrived at Wide World of Sports a few minutes after 4. I dropped my bag off at bag check and made a porta-potty stop right by bag check (lines weren’t bad at all). I learned my lesson from the day before and didn’t bother to try to get in line for the characters, as the lines were again huge. Somewhere around this time, there was apparently a power outage at the stage area so there was no music or lights. I wandered into the runners-only area, where I used the porta-potty again since I didn’t have anything else to do. It was not quite time but I decided to start wandering towards to corrals. Although the other corrals were open, they weren’t letting anyone into my corral (Corral C). They were filming something in the corral with a few people and a camera crew, but I wasn’t close enough to tell what it was. It started to get a little bit annoying as more and more people were arriving at the corral and a long line was starting to form. Finally they finished up with the filming and let us in.
The first few corrals are pretty small so corral C was quite close to the start line. The announcer mentioned that Jenny Simpson (who won a bronze in the 1500m at the Olympics this summer) was there to run the half, which I thought was pretty neat. She was using it as a training run, so was “only” planning to run 6:10-6:20 min/miles!!
Just before the race, a Disney singer sang the National Anthem, accompanied by fireworks.
At 5:30, Mickey and Minnie helped kick the race off for Corral A.
There was a three-minute delay between Corrals A and B and another three minutes between B and C. As each corral in front of us left, we crept closer to the start line.
The announcers chatted a bit with each corral. In our corral were the Galloway 2:00 pacers. They use a run-walk method to complete the course. This pace group was going to run for 2 minutes and then walk 30 seconds. The announcer asked our corral how many people were planning to finish with a “1” in front of their time, that is, under 2 hours. I laughed, as I definitely did not have that planned for my race. Once again, I was planning to stop for all the character pictures unless I didn’t know who they were or I had stopped for them the day before. After our 6-minute wait was up, Corral C started the race.
Right after the starting line, there was music playing, and it just happened to be “I’ll Make a Man Out of You” from Mulan. That made me really happy because it’s one of the few Disney songs on my running mix, so I listen to it all the time.
The first few hundred feet of the course were littered with debris from all the fireworks they had been setting off. That’s something that I’ve never noticed at a Disney race before. I was running at moderate pace. The Galloway pacers were running faster than I was but each time they stopped for their walk break, I would catch up or get close. After about 2/3 or ¾ of a mile, we took a left turn and I saw the first character stop. I laughed and almost passed them up. But there was no line and technically they didn’t meet one of my exemptions, so I decided to stop.
It was the Country Bears! It is sort of a running joke in my family that the Country Bears have always freaked me out. I refuse to go see their show. But I was brave enough to stop for a picture (although apparently not brave enough to look at the camera).
Shortly after the Bears, I passed the Mile 1 marker.
Mile 2 was a straight stretch of dark highway with no character stops (although I believe there were some music/dancers as entertainment on this stretch), so I ended up running it at a pretty fast pace.
The same was true for Mile 3, so that was another fast mile.
I was getting bored of straight, dark highway at that point, so I was glad to see Animal Kingdom off in the distance!
With my 6:30 pm bedtime, I managed a glorious 8.5 hours of sleep. Daylight savings time ended overnight, which gave an extra hour of sleep! I woke up about 2 am (the second 2 am) and rested/dozed a little more until my alarm went off at 3. I got myself prepped, ate the banana I had saved from the 10K the day before and headed out to the bus at about 3:40.
I boarded the bus right away. We stopped at a few of the Riverside stops until the standing room on the bus was filled (hopefully they were sending more buses to Riverside as we didn’t complete the loop). We arrived at Wide World of Sports a few minutes after 4. I dropped my bag off at bag check and made a porta-potty stop right by bag check (lines weren’t bad at all). I learned my lesson from the day before and didn’t bother to try to get in line for the characters, as the lines were again huge. Somewhere around this time, there was apparently a power outage at the stage area so there was no music or lights. I wandered into the runners-only area, where I used the porta-potty again since I didn’t have anything else to do. It was not quite time but I decided to start wandering towards to corrals. Although the other corrals were open, they weren’t letting anyone into my corral (Corral C). They were filming something in the corral with a few people and a camera crew, but I wasn’t close enough to tell what it was. It started to get a little bit annoying as more and more people were arriving at the corral and a long line was starting to form. Finally they finished up with the filming and let us in.
The first few corrals are pretty small so corral C was quite close to the start line. The announcer mentioned that Jenny Simpson (who won a bronze in the 1500m at the Olympics this summer) was there to run the half, which I thought was pretty neat. She was using it as a training run, so was “only” planning to run 6:10-6:20 min/miles!!
Just before the race, a Disney singer sang the National Anthem, accompanied by fireworks.
At 5:30, Mickey and Minnie helped kick the race off for Corral A.
There was a three-minute delay between Corrals A and B and another three minutes between B and C. As each corral in front of us left, we crept closer to the start line.
The announcers chatted a bit with each corral. In our corral were the Galloway 2:00 pacers. They use a run-walk method to complete the course. This pace group was going to run for 2 minutes and then walk 30 seconds. The announcer asked our corral how many people were planning to finish with a “1” in front of their time, that is, under 2 hours. I laughed, as I definitely did not have that planned for my race. Once again, I was planning to stop for all the character pictures unless I didn’t know who they were or I had stopped for them the day before. After our 6-minute wait was up, Corral C started the race.
Right after the starting line, there was music playing, and it just happened to be “I’ll Make a Man Out of You” from Mulan. That made me really happy because it’s one of the few Disney songs on my running mix, so I listen to it all the time.
The first few hundred feet of the course were littered with debris from all the fireworks they had been setting off. That’s something that I’ve never noticed at a Disney race before. I was running at moderate pace. The Galloway pacers were running faster than I was but each time they stopped for their walk break, I would catch up or get close. After about 2/3 or ¾ of a mile, we took a left turn and I saw the first character stop. I laughed and almost passed them up. But there was no line and technically they didn’t meet one of my exemptions, so I decided to stop.
It was the Country Bears! It is sort of a running joke in my family that the Country Bears have always freaked me out. I refuse to go see their show. But I was brave enough to stop for a picture (although apparently not brave enough to look at the camera).
Shortly after the Bears, I passed the Mile 1 marker.
Mile 2 was a straight stretch of dark highway with no character stops (although I believe there were some music/dancers as entertainment on this stretch), so I ended up running it at a pretty fast pace.
The same was true for Mile 3, so that was another fast mile.
I was getting bored of straight, dark highway at that point, so I was glad to see Animal Kingdom off in the distance!
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I definitely worked harder in the 6 months leading up to this race (while training for my September half) than at any other point in the 6 years I’ve been running, and it paid off big time. I felt really strong the whole race and just had so much fun doing it. 
