Disneyland Half Marathon Weekend Race Report

Friday September 3, 2010

We made our way down to Anaheim and met up with our friends from New York, Jamie, Veronica, T-Bone (Tess) and Cliff. Before we headed to the expo, we decided to engage in, the first of many, overly priced meals in Downtown Disney. After lunch we headed to the expo and did packet pickup and then went upstairs to the expo. This years expo was as lame as the previous years, same vendors, same races, etc. It's funny because the Walt Disney World Marathon/Half Marathon expo is much bigger with many of the running shoe manufacturers there and many more vendors, races, etc. We made a quick run through the expo and while the girls were shopping at the Disney section of the expo, I sat and listened to Jeff Galloway for a few minutes.
We went back to our hotel to pick up Paul and Jody from Texas and head back to the expo so Jody could pick up her race packet. I dropped off Tina, Jody and Paul and spent the next 40 minutes parking the car in the parking structure. By the time I got back to the expo, they were done and we headed of to Disneyland for a few hours of fun.

Saturday September 4, 2010

Jamie and T-Bone were running the 5K and we all came over to support them. I must say I was surprised at the amount of people that ran the 5K, I never heard an official number but it was in the thousands. The race started and off they went. We headed over to the mid point of the race to try and catch them crossing between Disneyland and California Adventure. We saw them, shouted some words of encouragement and took a few pictures and then made our way to the finish line inside of California Adventure. Standing near the finish, we waited and first came Jamie crossing the line and then T-Bone a few minutes later. Once they crossed the line, they were handed a piece of paper that said that due to a shipping issue, they didnt have enough medals.

No Medals?? WTF?

 The look of disappointment on people's faces was incredible, especially those that were running a race for the first time. It looked like about half the people were given medals and the other half IOU's. There was a nice gentleman who ran the race and had a medal and saw T-Bone looking quite disappointed. He walked over and asked if she got a medal, when she said no, he took his off and gave it to her. She wore that medal proudly around all day long. We spent the rest of the day in California Adventure. We all went to Buca Di Beppo for a carbo loading dinner before turning in early to get some rest before the half marathon in the morning.

T-Bone and Jamie after 5K

Sunday September 5, 2010

We left the hotel at 4:15am and procedded to get into a traffic jam trying to get into the parking structure. We have always left at the same time, and breezed right in, this time, it took about 30 minutes to drive the 2 miles from the hotel and get parked in the structure. I met up with Rachel and gave her the extra bib and chip that I had and went off to meet Veronica and Cliff. We made our way to corral D, where Veronica and Cliff were assigned and saw Penny, Kristy and Lauren, so we decided to wait with them until the race started.
After the National Anthem, the wheelchairs started followed by corral A. They put about a 3-5 minute spacing between the corrals this year. Finally, at 6:20am, we crossed the starting line and off we went. The whole goal of this race for me was to pace Veronica to a new half marathon PR of 2:15-2:20. I had given her a 16 week training plan and she followed it to the T and she was ready to make a run at that PR. If you have ever run this race, you know the first 3 miles are crowded and slow, but we did our best to keep a 10:00 per mile pace. I was a bit disappointed in the amount of people that A) either lied on their race registration regarding their time, or B) snuck into an earlier corral. I saw walkers that started quite a bit ahead of us and we were in the beginning of corral D.

We made it out of the parks and onto the streets of Anaheim and we were right on pace. At one point we were even ahead by about 50 seconds which was good since I knew things would slow down inside Anaheim Stadium. We made it to the stadium and it was filled with lots of people cheering.

We stopped so I could take a picture of Veronica on the field in the stadium, so having that extra time helped. Once out of the stadium, it was 3 miles to the finish. Around mile 11, I could see Veronica was starting to get tired and was falling behind a bit, so we took a quick walk break. Mile 12 was probably the toughest for her but I kept telling her to keep going. I know she was hurting but we were almost to the finish. We made it down the last 200 yards to the finish and once we crossed the finish line, she was all smiles and tears.  



Official time: 2:16:20  We stopped for a few photographs with our "bling". We wore 3 medals...WDW Half Marathon, Disneyland Half Marathon and the coveted Coast to Coast medal.

The Coast to Coast hardware

Cliff, Veronica, Bob, Jody

After a quick stop back at the hotel, we spent the rest of the day at the Disney parks. By the end of the day, my legs were a bit sore but my Zensah sleeves really helped. I wish I would have wore my Garmin all 3 days to see how many miles we actually walked around the parks. We went back to Jamie and Veronica's hotel room for a while and then said our good bye's as everyone would be getting on planes in the morning.

I must say that this was one of the best races I have run...not because of my time, but because I was able to share in Veronica's accomplishment of finishing with a new PR. I was glad to be a part of her special day. It was also great to finally meet some friends from twitter, some of which, I had never met in person before... Kristy, Lauren, Eva and Punkrockrunner, who looked a lot like Penny(Southbaygirl)

All in all it was a great weekend and went by way to quickly.

You can view all the pictures from the weekend here.