running: the dawn

I’m almost completely caught up with retelling my races from the past year!  Only one more after this one.

Ok, so I know when I ran the Disney Princess Half Marathon, I said that I probably wouldn’t pay for another Disney race.  Well….of course I did…when I found out that the Wine and Dine was a night race and a whole bunch of friends from work were planning on running it, I just couldn’t resist.  It was literally the last day before the price went up, I had already gotten in bed for the night and at 11:30 remembered that I HAD to register before midnight or I wouldn’t be able to justify the price.  So I jumped out of bed and quickly forked over the electronic cash.  

And approximately 24 hours later learned that I was pregnant.  OK, so maybe it wasn’t that dramatic…but I’m pretty sure it was within a week.  I went from, “Sweet–a fall half marathon, I’m totally going to go for a PR!!!” to, “Well, it’s a Disney race, I know…I’ll find some friends and stop to take pictures with all the characters!” So that’s what I did.

My friend Dave said that he would run with me to keep me company and call the ambulance if I went into labor.  By the time the race rolled around I was 26 weeks pregnant!  I was able to run fairly consistently leading up to the race, a couple short runs during the week and a longer-ish run on the weekends.  I only ran one 10 mile long run, which is way off my normal routine.  Good thing I was running just for fun!

It’s a very weird thing to be lining up to start a race at 10:00 at night.  Normally that would mean that I’d be done running just before midnight, but with my added passenger, I knew that it would take a lot longer.  I would be running into the wee hours of the morning.  I made a couple mistakes for my first night run…I didn’t think through my pre-race fueling.  I had a huge lunch that included “haystacks” (a do-it-yourself taco salad) and then all but skipped dinner.  I tried to drink some Gatorade before the race but it didn’t help much.  By mile 3 I was already dealing with some severe burping.

Luckily Dave and I stopped to take pictures with all the characters.  My favorite?  DARTH VADER!  Now that Disney owns Star Wars, he’s part of the family !

It was super fun to be pregnant at a race.  People were so supportive!  I actually met another girl that was preggers…she wasn’t showing at all and was only 12 weeks along but it was fun to chat about all the quirks that come with growing a human.

This ended up being one of the funnest half marathons I’ve ever run!  I liked the course WAY better than the princess half and running through the parks at night was so magical.  For this race we started at ESPN’s Wide World of Sports, ran through Animal Kingdom and Hollywood studios, ran around the lake and past some really impressive condos, and ended at Epcot.  The parks were already all decorated for Christmas and it was spectacular!  Especially Hollywood Studios…there was one section where the street was lined with building entirely covered with lights.  I can’t even describe it.  We literally stood there and admired/photographed it for a full five minutes (the bonus of racing for fun!).

My favorite part of the whole run was right near the end.  We were in Epcot and we rounded one corner and there was a laser light show going on right over our heads!  They were using a smoke machine to create just enough smoke so that the lights would form a kind of ceiling down the road. It was indescribably AWESOME!  There was loud music playing and we just got completely caught up in it.

My official finish time was over 3 hours, but it was seriously one of the most fun races that I’ve ever done.

Oh, and the girl from work that talked me into signing up in the first place, ran her first half marathon in under 2 hours!  Way to be Stephanie!!!