MAFD: Managed a 4.10 mile run today. Also.....
How I came to be here.
I grew up with Disney. My mom was a huge fan, the only movies I saw as a child were Disney, and Sunday nights were Wild Kingdom and the Wonderful World of Disney. Alas, with my parents being frugal cheap, my first ever visit to WDW was on our only family vacation, right after I graduated high school.
I did cross country in junior high, but my little bit of track was pole vaulting. After graduating college, I ran a little bit every now and then for exercise, but nothing too seriously, until I moved back to Atlanta and one July 5th had co-workers carrying on about the Peachtree Road Race. For all the years of living in Atlanta, I had never seen it in person.
By this time, I was feeding myself too well and had put on weight that I am still trying to lose. Oh, and I managed to develop athesma as a junior in high school.
As a result, I am a poster child for “You’re a runner?!” And why I try to encourage so many others on this forum. If my aging, porky self can do it, most anyone else can.
The Peachtree was the first 10K I ever ran, and the 6.2 miles of a 10K sounded very daunting. I started training and slowly built up to where I was comfortably running about 4 miles. I ran that ‘94(?) PTRR and finished in under an hour. And that is when and where things started, leading straight to today.
For a number of years, there was a string of PTRRs and various local 5Ks, but nothing more. In the meantime, the ex and I were going down to WDW at least once a year, sometimes twice, and kept doing so after we had kids. At some point, I remember saying how cool it would be to run at/through Disney and later found out that we could! I joined the Disney Running forum and later met and had a post-race dinner with the guy who ran it (can’t remember his name). He was the one who taught me that the races can be walked, and he did so, with surprisingly fast times.
So I signed up for the 2009 Half, and that 13.1 miles seemed very daunting, so I started training. I hadn’t been running, so it was start from zero, and at first it was run barely a quarter mile before I needed to stop and walk. But over the course of the following weeks and months, I built up my time and miles. And found out the hard way about shin splints and the need for quality shoes. And finished that first half in 2:36:48. Unlike all my other medals, that one is in a shadow box with photos. Why? Because at the time, I had no idea that I’d every do such a feat again. Or that I would got to the point of thinking “just a half”….
Somehow I found out about the Goofy Challenge, and decided to try that two years later (thus missing the 2010 Frozen marathon). Which meant that the 2011 Goofy was also my very first first marathon. Even with photo stops, I managed a 6:20. I was in the middle of a long, drawn out divorce in 2011 and that put a damper on distance running for a bit. In fact, I twice got into the MCM and twice had to forego running it due to divorce chaos.
Fast forward a few years and I’m at a class reunion and one of my classmates is showing a bedspread covered with medals as she explains that she and her DH ran the Dopey. Hmm, tell me more about this Dopey and all that bling! So the Dopey became a mountain that I needed to climb at some point. It took a while, but it was always in the back of my mind.
Fast forward to 2020 and the lockdowns, which started literally the week after the DW and I returned from our honeymoon. I’m in telecom and spent the first few weeks very busy with making sure people had internet, which was good for keeping myself busy. But after those first few weeks, I realized I needed to get off my backside for both physical and mental health and went back to running. So every afternoon at 4:00, I pushed back from my desk and headed out for a neighborhood run, building up to around 3 to 3.5 miles.
And always, there was Dopey in my thoughts, silently calling my name. With work being remote, I realized I had the chance to go run WDW again, and MW was a non-visitation weekend, so I took the plunge and signed up for the Dopey. Except instead of wondering (much) what I had signed up for, I was really excited about doing it, and became rather diligent about training. As noted in posts elsewhere, my Dopey training became my (tongue-in-cheek) HARM method of building up the endurance needed, if not with very long runs. And it worked. The most stressful part of the 2022 Dopey was getting down there. My car started venting transmission fluid on I-75; fortunately there was a Ford dealer at the next exit and they took my car in and ran me to a nearby rental place. I made it into the expo with 15 or 20 minutes to spare. Whew! That Dopey was and is one of my bigger personal achievements. Will I do another one? Maybe not, simply because of been-there/done-that and the extra time required. But two years later, I’m back at MW running my second Goofy, and sitting here planning on the 2025 Goofy and trying to get my son to come do the half with me.
As for the Marine Corps Marathon, that was finally accomplished in October 2023, making it my first and only (so far) non-Disney marathon. And two weekends ago was the third time I’ve had the opportunity to meet up with my fellow rD runners at the Hurricane Hannah meetup. That and the pre-race meetups are now one of the main highlights of MW.
One other thing is that I love the energy of a race, even for a local 5K, but it is greatly magnified to have the thousands of fellow runners all in one place at WDW for the weekend. It is electric.
<sits back in rocking chair> So that is how I came, much to my surprise, a distance runner and marathoner. As I told my wife, I never imagined it would lead to this. I’m slowly getting my weight down, and slowly getting faster, and totally enjoying (nearly) every minute of it.
Sorry for such a long post, but thanks for reading if you got this far. Next time I'll include an intermission.
He tells me that there is a 50% chance he might travel with me for Springtime Surprise.
. I’m happy to report that is not the case and I’ve ran 5 more rD weekends 
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