This is part two of my report of the 2018 Dark Side Half Marathon weekend – I again did the First Order Challenge, which means I ran the 10k on Saturday and the half marathon on Sunday. I talked about the expo and the 10k here. This is the race report for the half marathon.
So – a recap of where we are: I had just hit a massive PR on the 10k, in a crowded runDisney race. I was feeling really good about life in general, really. Saturday after the 10k I was able to legitimately rest. I took a nap with my three-year-old, and my wife made a spaghetti dinner. Because I’m still working on that last stubborn 20 pounds to lose, I hadn’t had spaghetti in a while and it was nice to be able to enjoy it guilt-free … including the seconds.
My goal for this whole weekend was to PR the 10k (check!) and then just get out there and have fun on the half marathon. I ran past some photo ops when I ran the half last year, and so I intended to make sure and get those this year during the run. The ice cave on Hoth, in particular, was a picture I regretted missing out on in 2017. So I wasn’t too worried about preparation or anything for this race – mostly I was just planning to survive it.
The weather wound up being a pre-race story. I’d intended to go to bed around 8pm, but I was pretty wound up for whatever reason, and the forecast wasn’t looking so good. All week they’d been calling for a good chance of rain on Sunday morning around race time, but by 8pm the night before they were saying a 70% chance of thunderstorms between 6:30am and 7:30am – right at the time when they would have nearly every runner on the course. If there was going to be lightning they were going to have to call this off, or at least delay it – and then, of course, there was the question of whether I wanted to go run in the rain at all given that I wasn’t taking the race all that seriously. In particular, I didn’t know (still don’t, really) how they would handle the character photos if it was raining. So I stayed up too late researching how and when we would know if they called the race off and finally went to sleep sometime around 9:30pm.
So the 2am alarm sucked, as you can imagine. I immediately pulled up the weather … and they had pushed the rain forecast all the way out to 10am at the earliest – some services had it pushed out until the afternoon. The race was on! I had some coffee, fixed a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and toasted a bagel, and headed out to Epcot. Same deal for parking as we had on the 10k – park at the finish line at Epcot, long walk over to some busses, bus over to the start line in the Magic Kingdom parking lot.
