And (1310) miles to go before I sleep: Disney World Marathon

Oh man.... This post is a bit late! The Disney Marathon (And surrounding vacation) was phenomonal! Tom and I flew in on his birthday and met up! He was coming from home and I was meeting up with him from a work conference in Mexico (Who can complain about that??). We got to Orlando and then headed over to Disney - We stayed on the grounds and did a food package too - Which was perfect. Basically we didn't have to worry about a thing while we were at Disney which was so perfect. My family (Aunt Ellen, Aunt Shelley, Uncle Mike) flew in to FL and spent a couple days with us in Florida also which was so cool! It is always so good to see them and we appreciated having them there for support (And good luck! I seem to PR when they are around!!) The pic to the right and above is us with our family in the parks - We had so much fun checking out the parks with them!

A couple days later my great Aunt Katie came up to meet us - And we all celebrated her birthday at a yummy Irish restaurant! So good to see her!

Like most race mornings - It came SUPER early. Tom and I took the Disney shuttle bus over to the beginning of the race. It was pretty chilly, so I wore some clothes that I could "throw away" before the race. We also met up with a friend from Colorado who was running her first marathon - Tabi! We spent some time just relaxing, not wasting much energy before the race. When it was time, we went to our appropriate corrals and began the journey (Felt like a long walk) to our actual corrals and the start of the race. The Disney World Marathon corrals you based off of previous finishing times. It was really cool because they released the corrals at different times, but each corral got the same send off. For corral fireworks went off and the announcer was very energetic. This was one of the many awesome touches that Disney had which was so cool, it was nice that each corral got the same send off and fireworks - For those of us not in the first corral it made it much more fun and kept the energy going!

When they got to my corral - I remembered my goal and my plan for the race and off I went. The course was awesome and I loved the Disney touches. Seeing the Magic Kingdom castle all lit up (It was still dark-ish when I came here) coming up to it was nothing short of magical - Seriously! It was beautiful, and they had Elsa and Ana up on the castle too. Running through the castle was also really amazing. They had characters out a long the course - If I weren't pushing for a PR this would be the race to stop and take pictures. Which plenty of people did - I passed LINES of people waiting to take a picture with a character mid race. Crazy!! Aid stations were plentiful and well stoked. Other cool perks was that when you ran through the parks the employees where there cheering you on. All the parks except Epcot where closed when I ran through them so it was nice to have that extra support from their employees in a place where other crowds couldn't gather and cheer you on! It was so awesome to see family at different points along the course too! I was pushing for a 4:30 time, but didn't quite make it... I finished in 4:34 which was still a 7 min PR off my previous best time! I was stoked!

PR for us both!


Picture post race with our family who came from Wisconsin to cheer us on!

Post race we celebrated with my family and spent another day at Disney. After that my family headed home and hubby and I continued our Florida vacation. We spent a day at Universal Studios, road tripped around Tampa, made lots of Brewery stops and spent some time in the Keys before flying home on my birthday from Miami.