Disney Trip

We just returned from the Disney Marathon Weekend. It was certainly a trip to remember. I had promised a group of princesses from the DisneyRunning.com forum that I would help them through their first marathon and that turned out to be the most satisfying and memorable time I've ever had at the marathon distance.

Not being a talented writer I can't make my words paint mental pictures for you but I surely try to give you something to think about from my words. We have many experiences, some that we love remembering and some we sure wish we could erase. But we are all the sum of where we have been and what we have experienced. This weekend was one of those that I will love remembering.

I started out with 2 ladies and one gentleman from Canada that had never done the marathon before as well as 2 ladies that had completed one. We started before daybreak and marched through the Epcot park and out on to the highway going to the Magic Kingdom. Since none of us had really had a good training year it was going to be an interesting race.

Everything went pretty smoothly till about 12 to 13 miles. Then another DisneyRunning member caught up with us and told me that my lady had dropped back behind me. So I turned around and with back a few miles to the back of the race and couldn't find her. I caught back up with my group and one of my ladies was having a hard time of it so I stayed the rest of the race with her.

I finally got Erica on her cell phone and discovered she was a few miles ahead of us instead of being behind. She agreed it was better for me to stay back with our friend instead of catching up to her since she was doing fine. She ended up with a PR and helped another woman through the last miles.

I'm a walker, I was not going to win this race and helping my team mate gave me a purpose instead of just being able to say I finished another marathon. This one was a shared adventure.

I went into this as did Erica with little distance work. We had only done 3 walks of ten miles, the rest were 3, 4 and 5 milers. But we combined those walks with other activities so the time in motion was more that just the time spent doing the ten milers. Several of my team mates did the same and all finished fine. This first experiment with time in motion instead of high miles appears to be successful.

I also completed the race in a pair of shoes I had just bought at the Expo the day before. I'm a firm believer that a good running/walking shoe doesn't need to be broken in. It should be ready to perform right out of the box. I use racing flats to walk my races so I like the maximum amount of cushion I can get, so I race marathons with them when they are brand new.

Thanks for reading.

Tired Panda