Prior to the race, during the weekend I had an awesome time with Kimberly Markey. Friday morning my flight was at 8:25 a.m. My husband sent me a text from work at 6:15 that said that there was an accident on the highway, lanes were closed. I checked the news and freaked out a bit. When my dad came he checked his phone and recommended I go up through Durham and hop on Rte 9. That was a success. I had some scary minutes there, but once I hit Hartford at it was 7:00 I was happy. I knew I’d be in the shuttle by 7:30 which was my original plan. Had I gone the normal route, there’s no way I would have made my flight. I met Kimberly Markey at the airport and we boarded the plane shortly after I arrived. The flight down was easy and fast. We chatted the whole time.
My plan was to arrive in Orlando, pick up a car, go to the Expo with Kim and head over to Merritt Island to visit my friend Shannon and spend the night there. When we arrived in Orlando, Shannon had sent me a text that her son was puking all over the place, so I decided to make other plans for that night. I was looking forward to seeing her and spending the day and night with her! Kim offered her room to me so I took her up on it. Thankfully I am good with going with the flow.
We picked up the car, drove over to ESPN WWS and got a great parking spot. We went to the merchandise area, found what we wanted to purchase and checked out. The line was long, but it moved very quickly. From car to merchandise and checkout and over to packet pick up was 30 minutes. Then we went to packet pick up which also moved very quickly. After getting the race materials we did some shopping around the expo. There were good vendors there that we were interested in. We got the chance to say hi to Carissa Bealert!
After the expo we checked in at the hotel, grabbed a light snack in the food court and drove over to the Polynesian to go to the meetup with Linda Bachand from the Endurance Sports group and had dinner at Kona. The meetup was a lot of fun and the dinner at Kona was delicious! I got the sushi and salad and Kim got the lamb and salad.
Next we hopped on the monorail and went to the Magic Kingdom for the Mickey’s Not So Scary Halloween Party. I LOVE this party! My favorite part was the Dance Party in Tomorrowland. We got onto space mountain with no wait and also did some trick or treating. Then we hopped on the barnstormer, with no wait, the Little Mermaid and Kim’s favorite was getting our picture taken with the 7 dwarfs!
I never knew that the pumpkins along Main Street were carved in the theme of the store or location they represent. For instance the ice cream shop, or Casey’s Corner! That is just like Disney to do something so cool!
We sat and watched some of the parade, found a good spot afterwards to watch the wishes show and made our way up main street so that would could be near the front for a quick exit after the fireworks. The day was catching up to us and we were getting tired so we left before the finale of the fireworks. We were back to our room by 11 and hit the sack.
Kim had to get up early for the 5K Saturday.
The Tower of Terror 10 miler race was FANTASTIC! With each Disney race that I run I am loving each one more and more. They all have their own theme and uniqueness to them. There are many first that you can do in Disney and I will be writing about those first in upcoming blog posts. It was my first Tower of Terror race, and it was my first night race. I had a very successful run and there were many factors that led to my success. I listened to the Mickey Miles podcasts in the weeks prior to the race and they had tips and recommendations from experts like Jeff Galloway about how to prepare for a night race. I believe I was successful because of the following:
- I had a great breakfast.
- I rested for the afternoon and stayed off my feet after 4:00
- I had a light lunch around 3:30 which was a turkey sandwich from Subway with some baked chips
- I hydrated myself a lot with Powerade and water during the day
- While waiting for the line up to the corral I had an applesauce
- Just before our corral was let out I had a Gu
- During the run I took Powerade at most of the water stops instead of water
Stay tuned for part two the actual Tower of Terror 10-miler race!
I’ve been to Disney for WDW Marathon weekend sooo many times for my husband. I finally decided to run one myself, and now I want to run every runDisney event. Disney can put on a great themed race!!
So glad to hear you had a good run, looking forward to hearing more about it since it really sounds like they improved it over last year. And it sounds like you had a good race day plan that worked well, unfortunately I totally overate heading into this race last year…going to the Food & Wine festival probably wasn’t the best idea!