Florida-Disney World Goofy Challenge, January 10^th, 2010

http://www.rundisney.com/disneyworld-marathon/

The Goofy Challenge (two days, four parks and 39. 3 miles!)

I truly believe you have to be Goofy to run this race.   This challenge consists of a half marathon on Saturday followed by a full marathon on Sunday! I will have to say that it was a magical run as we ran through Magic Kingdom, Epcot, Animal Kingdom and Hollywood Studios!

This was the first time we ever did back to back marathons and I wasn’t sure how we were going to do this as it is pretty hard to change.   We had read Jeff Galloway’s Marathon running book (highly recommend!) so decided to leverage this running/walking style to insure that we would finish both Marathons!

The first day running the half marathon was not tough and we were not in too much pain that evening so we felt good about the run the next day. We got to see and take pictures with many characters this day and took advantage of this as we were not sure how our time would end up on marathon day and if we would have enough time to take pictures on the course.

On the morning of the marathon we ended up being in the same group as Jeff Galloway and his wife- what coincidence. He was there with a group of runners that I am guessing he trained with the Galloway method. Since we had the opportunity, we decided to just run with them as we felt if we could keep this up we would definitely finish and get a good time. His group ran/walked in 1:1 intervals (1 minute run/1 minute walk). When you use this type of interval, your runs must be fast. We had a hard time keeping up with the 1 minute pace and therefore switched to our normal run walk pace of 3 minute run/1 minute walk. It was amazing but we kept up with them during the first part of the course and then somehow we lost them ( I think because we stopped to take pictures!).   One funny thing is that David and I lost each other during this race. We are still not sure how this happened but we eventually found each other after spending a lot of time looking for Mickey Mouse ears in the crowd (yes and you can see from the picture we work Mickey Mouse hats the entire run)! The time spent looking for each other did impact our time but as you know from now TIME is not a crucial factor in our running, but FINISHING is!

We made it through this magical adventure and took some great pictures along the way. Disney knows how to put on a great marathon! I highly recommend this to everyone!

 Memories

Training for back to back

• Magical experience – we always had something to look at and the crowds were amazing!
• Taking pictures with characters
• Meeting Jeff Galloway and following his method of running alongside him
• Losing my Mickey and then finding him!
• The medals are awesome!
• Just plan Magical!!!