Wicked Race Report... Wicked Late

A few weeks ago I signed up last-minute for the Wicked Half Marathon. This was a bit of an unfinished-business race. I saw the t-shirt 2 years ago and decided I HAD to do it, so I signed up last year, and got lost on the way to the start. Damn. I've always had good luck in Salem (also at this link, and this one)... at least to the races I can find the start of, and since I was going to miss the Wild Turkey 5 mile race this year, I was just itching to run in Salem. I know, me, itching to run. Weird, right?

This year, my body is different. For reasons that are a mystery to me, I've been running a lot faster. I also hadn't run more than 10.5 miles since last February. How would my body react to a half marathon? Would I crash? Would 13.1 hard miles tear my legs apart? It was a regular training week, so I wasn't especially rested stepping into this race (but come on, that's not that out-of-the-ordinary for me). I hadn't run a road race in about 8 months... What would happen?

I was trying some new nutrition tactics to deal with my phantom poo problem. I had a light breakfast, only 2 pieces of peanut butter toast, and tucked my usual smoothie into the mini igloo for after the race. I went to Starbucks, but I only sipped about a quarter of my coffee on the way to the start. I'd had a shitty night's sleep, so passing on the joe took some willpower. When I got to the race, I vowed to break Claire's Number 1 Rule of Public Pooping: Don't, but I had to walk about half a mile from my parking spot to the school. Then there were only three bathroom stalls, and a line out the door for the bathroom. As I got closer to the front of the line, I realized that one of the stalls was missing a door. How could I break Claire's Number 1 Rule of Public Pooping if there was no door?! Luckily, when my turn came, my stall had a door. Too bad I stepped into the stall at 6:59. The race was supposed to start at 7:00! I got out what I could, washed my hands, and ran for the door.

Luckily, they held off the start for about 10 minutes and I had plenty of time to elbow my way into the starting corral. There was plenty of room, and when the gun went off I got to start running right away. Weird. It was one of those courses that look pancake flat on the course profile, but once you're running on it, the undulations really break up your rhythm (or mine anyway, I can't run up a hill to save my life). The weather felt cool, but as I started running I felt fine in just spanky shorts and a t-shirt.

Rather than watching my watch and trying to sit on a goal pace, this time I was trying something different. I kept my head up and only checked my watch at the mile markers. In between, I would listen to my breathing and my body. I tried to ignore what everyone around me was doing. I fell in with some runners who were going at a pace that felt comfortable and tried to resist the urge to pass people who were only a few yards ahead. Steady, I told myself. Find a groove you can follow for the next 13 miles. Then every time my breathing got hard I would remind myself to just find a groove.

I looked down at my watch at the first mile marker: my watch said .98 miles in 7:39. Good, the mile markers were right on. I knew that I probably wasn't going to hold 7:39's for the whole course, but hey, I had no idea what my body was going to do. This pace felt good and so I was going to sit on it dammit! I looked away from my watch and kept running.

My second mile came at about the same interval, 7:41. At the third mile, the hills started. I laid off and watched everyone around me pull away. A woman running with her long hair down (I hate that!), an iPod in her ears (I hate that!), and a running skirt (I hate that!) pulled ahead of me, and I resisted the urge to hate her guts. I knew that if I pushed the pace anymore I knew I would dig myself into a hole I couldn't get back out of. Mile 3 came in 7:46, phew, I didn't lose much time. Mile 4 was also steady: 7:45.

By mile 5, we hit the lollipop through some rolling hills. As we set out on the lollipop, we saw the race leader coming back in the other direction. "Fuck that!" I heard a voice say over my right shoulder. I looked over and saw a guy in an Mdot hat. Now that could keep me inspired to push. You all know how I feel about Mdot folks. "Is that a Timberman hat?" I asked.
"No, Rhode Island," he said. Then he started the Mdot monologue about how he'd done Ironman Florida, blah, blah, blah. New Zoot shoes, blah, blah. I watched more backs pull away as I we the next mile marker in 7:49, but my Mdot buddy was still there, telling me more about the shoes. "I'm a heel striker, see. And this shoe has almost no padding. It just doesn't fit my running stride." Still high on my barefoot running kick from reading Born to Run, I bit my tongue about the shoes probably being a good idea for a guy like him. When it came out later that he runs a 10K in western Mass and is a coach, I was apalled.
We hit another hill and I said, "Well, this is where you pull ahead of me. Byeee!" and let him heel-strike on ahead. But at the next water stop, there he was, massaging his calf. "You alright?" I asked.
"Yeah, shoes just making me cramp up. These people cannot have a booth at my expo!" he said. I ran on. Alone. But the chick with the long hair and the skirt was still ahead. The big hills came between miles 6 (8:04) and 7 (7:55).

Starting at mile 8 I was beginning to feel fatigue. I had decided not to put any calories in my drink bottle, and I was beginning to wonder if it would be a problem as we ran over the jetty back into Salem. My stomach hadn't given me problems, but now I was having other issues from the lack of food. My 8th mile split was 7:59, but I finally picked off the lady in the skirt. I slowed down at an aid station and grabbed a Dixie cup of water, pouring it down my shirt more than in my mouth as I ran on.

Mile 9 came in 7:58 and I could feel the wheels falling off. One of the muscles in my right quad (vastus medialis, i think) was beginning to kill, and breathing was getting pretty hard at an 8:00 pace. Mile 10 was 7:59, and lasted a lifetime. I wasn't really falling apart, but it was that feeling of impending doom that you get when you realize that you're falling behind on your nutrition, and you're not going to make it to the end before you run out of gas.

Miles 11 (8:00) and 12 (7:52) felt like they were lasting forever, and like they were over in no time. My right quad was really killing me now, a feeling I've never had. I hadn't run this far all year, and although my long runs had been faster, they had still been 30 seconds per mile slower than this. Finally, I was inside the last mile as other runners kicked it in, so did I. The problem was, despite doing my hardest running all day, I was running my second slowest mile (8:03). I did everything I could to hold on. My quad was killing me! When was this going to be over?

Still, I let myself watch my Garmin in the last mile so that I would know when I could pick up the kick without digging myself into a hole. I was going to set a half marathon PR. I thought that if I broke 1:45 for a half marathon that would certainly put me square in the middle of the pack, but I could only see one guy pulling away about 100 yards ahead of me and there was no one else around. What do I have to do to catch the pack at a half marathon?

Now I could see the school. I did everything I could to kick it in, but this had to be the longest .1 mile of my life. I timed the final sprint to end right where the crowd started, because the finish line had to be there. I had been running for way longer than .1 miles, but when I reached the crowd, they directed me down into the parking lot. I still had some 50 yards to go, and it was just enough to deflate my final sprint. I was mad. Every mile marker had been dead on with my Garmin, and now I finished with 13.2 miles on my odometer. Lame! The last .2 miles were at 7:26 pace, some sprint!

One of my uglier finishing moments. Looks like A) I'm still heelstriking, and B) my quads are enormous! (yuck!), and C) look how far off the ground I am! Why can't I just run at a fast cadence like fast people?!

I finished in 1:44:01, or 1:44:06, or 1:44:08, whether you believe Garmin, my HRM, or the official time for a 7:53 mile if you believe Garmin, and 7:57 if you believe the official results. It was about a 2:13 PR. I had finished 110th overall (19%), and 13th of 105 in my age group (12%), but I would't get too excited about it since there were people who ran in superhero costumes. As I was fishing a water bottle out of the kiddie pools at the finish, the chick with no hair tie and the running skirt came up to me. "You're really strong. I was chasing you for the last 5 miles and I just couldn't catch you!" Hehehe... I win! I thought, but I smiled and told her that she'd been pushing me for the five miles before that. The best part though? I finally beat Gadfly Thom! I was wandering around the finishing area with that dazed look that you get after a race when I saw him come through two minutes behind me! So ha!

Just not my day

Some days, things just don't work out the way you want them to. Today was one of those days, and that's okay. As you read the following race report, you should know that I am not in the least disappointed about what happened. So you shouldn't be either. It was what it was, and now it's over and I'm not going to lose any sleep about it. I know that there was nothing that I could have done under the circumstances to have a better race.

Despite being signed up, I had no intention of running the Hyannis Marathon until the Thursday before. That's why I all but quit running after Disney World, running only 12 times in the 6 intervening weeks, for a whopping 70 miles total over that time. But when the time came, something in me wouldn't let me quit without a fight. As luck would have it, though, the day I changed my mind about running the marathon, the weather channel changed their mind about the forecast for that day. Gone was the promise of 32º and partly cloudy. Now it was going to be 42º, rainy, and windy.

I did everything right (other than not training... or resting properly in the weeks before... or doing the right workouts to peak) in the days before the race. I got lots of sleep. I hardly used my legs all week (the 12 hours on the trainer last weekend was already behind me, and there wasn't much I could do about that now). I ate 60–70% of my calories from healthy carbohydrate sources like fruits and whole grains. I drank liters and liters of liquids, some with nuun tabs in it so that I could load up on electrolytes. I went out the day before in similar temperatures and did some drills and strides to make sure that I didn't overdress or underdress. I laid low.

Big Red and I showed up at the convention center early, which gave us one unobstructed bathroom break before the 3,998 other marathon, half marathon, and 10K runners descended on the tiny little Sheraton. I showed Red my good luck rock that I'd been given at the Green Lakes 50K, where I'd surprised myself with a great race. "So your race plan is to run with rocks?" Big Red said. She had a point. I took the rock out and put it in my bag.

By the time the race was about to start, it took almost 15 minutes to push your way through the crowd to the door. Then, 4,000 people crammed themselves into a chunk of road equal to roughly 1 city block and put up with the race organizers as they tried to impose order on the latecomers from the porta pottie lines that were trying to work their way behind the starting line from the front and sides. Someone sang the national anthem, missed a note, and 4,000 people started laughing. Then the gun went off, and eventually we were able to move.

Mile 1 8:06

With all kinds of runners front-loading into the starting area, I worried about being able to run fast enough in the first mile. I kept reminding myself that I would have plenty of time to make up for lost time in the next 25 miles, but I kept looking down to see that my pace was in the mid- to high 7-minute range. I planned to impose (on penalty of death) a narrow pace margin of 8:12 to 8:22-minute miles on myself for the first half, but I guess I might have overcompensated as I was darting through the crowd. Oh well, the first mile never goes the way you want it to.

Mile 2 7:55

This feels hard. Well no wonder! I'm back in the mid 7's. I kept trying to find a steady rhythm, but every time I looked down I was accelerating again. Then I would have to back off and overcompensate again. I thought I was doing a pretty good job of staying within range, but when the next mile marker came up, my watch told me that I'd overshot it a little bit. I was very, very, very, very aware of what could happen if I fucked up the pacing, and I had no intention of blowing to smithereens. I usually do 8- to 10-mile tempo runs at 8-minute pace, so I knew that I was still in familiar territory. I should be okay.

Mile 3 8:06

I was supposed to eat here, but it was still too crowded. And I felt the slightest hint of intestinal upset. I didn't want to give myself that poopy feeling so soon, so I held off on the food. To my surprise, I saw Big Red up ahead of me. She was supposed to be running hard. She was supposed to be long gone. I came up behind her and gave her a big smack on the ass as I pulled alongside her. "Hey, girlie. How you doin'?" I asked

"Not good. My back's bothering me," Big Red's got a chronic back condition that comes and goes. "Run like the wind, my friend!" she called after me. Well that was no fun! I wanted her to have a great race that I could simmer with jealousy over later. I wanted her to be far, far ahead of me so that I would HAVE to finish the marathon, if only to not give her the satisfaction of beating me. At the very least, I wanted her to keep up so that she could keep me company for part of this long day. God knows I would be lonely enough on the second loop. But she was gone, and I never saw her again. She would later tell me that she was disappointed that I passed her so quickly, "But then I looked down at my pace and saw why," she said.

Mile 4 8:12

Well that's more like it! I was finally successful in reigning myself in... sort of. But now the hills were starting. Okay, they weren't hills. They were the slightest of rollers. There was hardly any elevation gain on the whole course. But I am a weak hill runner by nature, and since I've been doing 90% of my running indoors this winter (and it's easy to keep a treadmill at 0% incline), these hills might as well have been mountains. It was like the bungee had finally stretched to its limit, and now I was snapping back. Well that's alright, I thought (somewhat naïvely), I'm finally within my pace range. In fact, my watch was beeping more and more to tell me to speed up.

Also, I was getting pretty hot. I'd been warm and sweaty since the first mile, but now I was beginning to wonder if it would be a problem. I couldn't take my jacket off because it had my snacks in the pocket, and I had no other pockets. My jacket and I were committed to each other. I'd written what my splits should be at 4-mile intervals on my arm, but when I rolled my sleeve up to check, I'd already sweat mile 16 and beyond into oblivion.

Mile 5 8:08

I passed the Hoyts. This time, I didn't think I was going to throw up all over them, and I passed them sooner (I'm sure that the bigger "hills" in Hyannis compared to Disney make pushing a wheelchair harder and slowed their pace). Maybe it was because I was running slower. Maybe it was because they were running slower. Maybe it's because New Englanders are more stoic than the rest of the country (represented at the Disney Marathon). Maybe it's because everyone on The Pre-Boston Circuit has done half a dozen races with the Hoyts. Maybe I was just in a pocket of curmudgeons. But people around me weren't getting as worked up about the Hoyts either, which probably helped me to keep my excitement under control this time, and keep my breakfast down. I did speed up from my last mile, though, and we were still going "uphill."

Mile 6 8:23

I already knew I was in trouble. My legs just weren't waking up. Running was hard. The course turned "downhill," but the wind picked up and I slowed down. You can still do this, I thought. Just run steady, and you won't tire out. Just cool your heels for a bit and you'll come right. But I knew. Deep down inside me, I knew that I wasn't going to be running a marathon today. I had done everything right today, and my legs just weren't coming around. I'd managed to get some food in, but I'd never practiced eating at this pace (remember? I didn't actually train for this race). It was hard to eat and breathe at 8:15 min/miles. And I could feel that my legs didn't feel the way they've felt on good runs in the past. They weren't springy. I felt like I'd started with half a tank, but it didn't matter because the engine would break down before I ran out of gas. I felt like I feel on the bike when a brake is rubbing.

Mile 7 8:04

We were gaining elevation again, but I sped up this mile. Maybe this was the part where I got angry at myself for thinking defeat. Maybe I tried to rally. Maybe this was the section where they had traffic going in each direction and no sidewalk on a narrow back street, but I pulled myself back together and soldiered on. I still FELT okay, I just knew that it was over. Maybe just knowing that my mind was already made up made me speed up for a decent half marathon. Could I still save this half marathon? Stupid question, idiot! You promised yourself that you would run 8:20's whether you finished a half marathon or a full! Stick to the plan! You might come around yet.

Mile 8 8:22

Time to check the splits on my arm again. I was still on pace, less than a minute faster than what it said on my arm. Can you keep this pace up for 18 miles without slowing down, though? I asked myself. I knew that there was no way. Can you finish a marathon strong? Maybe? I still held out hope. We were climbing to the top of what would be the biggest "hill" on the course now, and I felt like I'd been running uphill forever – since mile 3!

Mile 9 8:25

The course was now on Route 28, a highway as far as Cape Cod goes. It was 2 lanes in each direction with no sidewalk, and runners were crammed into a narrow three-foot strip on the side of the road. Some people were speeding up to negative split their races, while others were falling to pieces. There was a lot of passing going on, and not nearly enough space to do it. Also, the wind was picking up to about 15 mph and it was getting downright chilly.

Mile 10 8:30

The wheels fell off. We were headed back downhill now, but it didn't matter with the headwind we were running into. Turning off of Route 28, a man passed me. "Come on blue!!" he said. The marathon bibs were blue, half marathon were white.
"I'm not running a marathon today," I told him. Why wouldn't these people let me die in peace? Why is there always someone who tries to make you suffer more, when there is no way you could possibly run any faster?
"Aw come on, you're holding your pace! I've been trying to catch you for miles!"
"No, really. I gave up on this race a month and a half ago. I just want to get it over with now."
"You'd better not talk like that. Come on, you need a pacer?" he asked. "I'll slow up to get you through." It was exactly what I would have wanted on a perfect day, a symbiotic relationship with another runner: he would get company, I would get a pacer. But I knew I was dead meat.
"I will not take responsibility for you having a horrible race. Run on ahead, and I don't want to catch you back here again!" I said. "Believe me, I'm a gonner. Have a great race."

I was glad to see that he wasn't going to try to pull me along, because the air it took to have that conversation was enough to put me over the edge. I now wondered how I was even going to finish the next 2.5 miles, let alone a marathon. With all the passing and being passed that was going on, I couldn't find a comfortable rhythm and felt like I was running through pudding.

Mile 11 8:23

Out of nowhere I hear, "HEY!" over my left shoulder. It was Gadfly Thom. I had never been AHEAD of Gadfly Thom in a race before, and certainly not this late in the game. I couldn't believe it. But it was over now. There was no way I was going to be able to keep up with him. "How you doing?" he managed to get out before he passed.

"Awful. Really, really awful." I guess something in my tone of voice told him that I wasn't being my usual sarcastic self on this one, because he didn't push me. I could see him for quite some time, pulling away in front of me (he's easy to spot: probably one of 2 black guys who did the race), and it just made me feel like I was sinking. I thought of stopping and waiting for Big Red, but I thought she would kill me for waiting. And what if she was right behind me, and I didn't even get time to recover before she dropped my sorry ass? There was nothing to do but keep running.

Mile 12 8:45

It was now extremely windy and cold. I could barely get my mind around even getting to the end of the block, let alone getting back to the start/finish area. I knew that there was positively no way I could even finish a marathon today. All I could do was hang on. I had the distinct sensation that my blood pressure or my heartrate or something were too high. I got tunnel vision, felt woozy, and felt like my head was going to explode. I get this feeling a lot when I'm pushing hard at the end of races. I'll have to figure out exactly what it is, so that I can avoid it.

Mile 13.25 8:43 pace

When I crossed the 13-mile marker, I took off my race belt and crumpled my number up in my hand. I didn't want anyone giving me a hard time about packing it in. I just wanted to drop out in peace. I knew it was the only option I had today. I put in as much of a kick as I could muster, but my pace was nearly equal to the past mile. I finished without fanfare in 1:50:03, for an average of 8:19 minutes per mile in real miles, officially 8:23. I was exactly 3 seconds off the pace for running a 3:40 marathon, if I had turned around and run the same exact race over again. Lord knows that wasn't going to happen. I was a mess.

Afterward

Big Red came in 3 or 4 minutes behind me, and we stood around for awhile waiting for one of her friends to come through. By the time he came in, it was raining, and the icy wind was constant. Over the next hour, it started to pour down rain, and as we were driving away from the expo center, we saw the 3-hour marathoners around the 23-mile mark. Their clothes were plastered against them from the wind and they looked like they were in hell.

Big Red had several friends in the Hyannis area, so we had lunch with her mother and a family friend while the freezing rain pissed down outside. Also, I had the same problem that I'd had after Disney where my lower intestinal tract shut down. I felt like my insides were rotting out, like someone had put my small intestine through a blender. Yet another reason to be happy I hadn't tried to run the full marathon.

I knew that not finishing the race was the right decision. There was no part of me that was upset that I'd quit halfway. I'd done the best I could under the circumstances, and I just didn't have a good race in me. Between the course and the weather, it just wasn't a PR day. There was absolutely no way I could have even finished that marathon, and I just would have made myself sick if I'd tried. There will be more chances in the future, and eventually my day will come. Today just wasn't it. The perfect day was probably last January in Disney World, but I decided to do something else with my fitness that weekend. My body will come around again and let me run strong some other time. But right now, it's several months past time to be moving on.

Goodbye, running. I'll see you again in the fall.

She's sung.

Update: I finally had the heart to check the results. Mercifully, I'm not listed in the marathon results with a DNF next to my name. I'm not in the half marathon results either, though. I would have finished in roughly 615th place out of 2044 overall (30%), and 88th out of 413 in my age group (21%). Last year I finished nearly 9 minutes slower to make only the top 54% over all, and 49% in my age group.

Goofy... finally

Angry, Leana, and I do the classic "Leana pose" in Hollywood Studios.

Note: I know this is a long one. Feel free to read all or parts of it, or just look at the pictures. It doesn't really matter.

Background Information

For those of you who aren't savvy to what the "Goofy Race and a Half Challenge" is, then let me clue you in. Where most marathons run a half and full marathon concurrently, on Disney's marathon weekend, the half marathon is on Saturday and the full marathon on Sunday. This leaves the option open for numbskulls to run both races in one weekend. Disney, always quick to capitalize on any way to make money, quickly picked up on the fact that these numbskulls were out there, and offered them the opportunity to pay $40 extra for registration than if you were to sign up for each event individually, and call it the Goofy Challenge!!! For your extra $40, you get not only the half and full marathon t-shirts and medals, you also get a Goofy t-shirt: identical in every way to the marathon and half marathon t-shirts you receive, only that the character pictured on the shirt is Goofy, instead of Donald (half), or Mickey (marathon); and a Goofy medal: identical in every way to the marathon and half marathon finishers' medals, differing only in the character pictured on the medal. As you may or may not expect, this event caters more to the t-shirt whores, finishing medal gluts, and self-mortifying masochists who do races more to have something to brag about at other races than to beat their personal times. I suppose all the real runners out there have satisfied their thirst for finishers' t-shirts, and realize that running a half marathon the day before a marathon is no way to hit a PR, and you can punish yourself just as much by running a marathon hard as you can running a half and full marathon back to back at half-speed.

Although I am a t-shirt whore, finishing medal glut, and self-mortifying masochist, believe it or not, signing up for this race was not my idea. I swear. When Runner Leana did the race last year, I was intrigued by the idea, but had no intention of doing the race any time in the near future. Angry was also in attendance last year, and ran his first marathon in a time far less impressive than what he thought himself capable of. It was his idea to sign up for the race in '09, so that he wouldn't have to live with his "pathetic" marathon PR forever. It didn't take much prodding to get me to sign up with him last January, but it wasn't my idea. Angry planned to train running a few short, fast miles and using Crossfit as 90% of his marathon training, while I planned to use my tried and true high-volume approach with traditional speed work on the track and treadmill. There was lots of shit talking all last spring about who could run a better combined time over the course of the two races, and the loser was going to have to walk around for the day in a Tinkerbell costume and take lots of pictures to be posted all over the internet.

But then Angry dropped out, or "failed to start," as he put it. So here I was running this stupid thing alone, and not particularly thrilled about it. Alright, I wasn't alone, Cranky and Leana were running the marathon, and Angry was going to be on the sidelines to cheer me on, but I would have no one to commiserate with about the added annoyance of the half marathon. On top of that, I was supremely annoyed about peaking for a marathon where it would be impossible to run to the best of my ability. But I'm not a quitter, and just couldn't bring myself to drop out of the half marathon to get that Boston Qualification that was gnawing at my conscience.

Pre-Race(s)

I disdain other runners, if you haven't figured that out yet. Everywhere you go they dress up for the expo in their best marathon attire: (Mdot) memorabilia is best, followed closely by Boston Marathon threads, and if you don't have those then wear your most impressive t-shirt from a half ironman or another marathon. Alternatively, you could wear the full jumpsuit from your local tri- or track club. Then you have to talk as loud as you can to everyone around you about all the races you've done (calling them only by the city where they take place, of course! Boston, Kona, Clearwater, whatever... People who don't know what you're talking about are lesser human beings and don't deserve to understand you anyway). All those people were out in full force on the plane, talking about every race that everyone has done (including me) and using thinly veiled-attempts to find out if they were the fastest ones on the plane. I'd planned to read on the plane, but all those people on the plane thought that they were so special in their Boston jackets, sucking out of their Timberman water bottles, and talking about how they did at this and that Boston Prep race last year that I had to put in headphones just to drown them out. Sure, I was listening to podcasts about triathlon, but no one had to know that! My new book, Long Distance Cycling stayed hidden in my bag for the whole flight. I am not like those people, I tried to tell myself.

Right: Proof that I wore a skirt.
The expo was, of course, mayhem. With over 20,000 runners running the marathon, half marathon, and Goofy Challenge, the place was packed. But also, with all of the t-shirt whores and first-timers that this particular marathon attracted, God help you if you got between Suzie TNT and her "WDW Marathon Finisher" official display case. With my disdain for stereotypical runners, I had planned an outfit especially for the expo. While everyone was wearing their chotchkies and Generic Marathon USA t-shirts, I dressed for the occasion in a pink halter top that showed lots of skin, and a skirt. That's right, I put on a skirt and a pink shirt, and I wore them all day at the expo. When I spotted Cranky in the crowded expo, I waved my arms and yelled his name several times as I walked up to him, but he looked right through me. He didn't even recognize me until I reached right in front of his face to tap him on the shoulder.

Keeping my eye on what was truly important, I'd forgotten to print my waiver, and had also forgotten that I'd signed up to use my own chip, but I remembered a print-out of my Hartford Marathon results to prove that I could run a half marathon in less than 2 hours, and a marathon in less than 4. Once I'd printed my waiver and gotten new chips from Runner Relations, I busted out my color print-out of the Hartford Marathon results, with my splits highlighed and presented them to the woman at the desk. It was enough to get me bumped up to Corral B in the marathon, and Coral A in the half!!! I knew that this wasn't a very competitive marathon, but Corral A?! I felt like a rock star!

Angry, Cranky, Cranky's sister, and I hung around the expo arena for a few hours eating and waiting for Leana to turn up. We were shocked to see the number of people who had donned their race t-shirts the second they were handed over. Didn't these people know what bad race karma that is? So tacky! We spoke for a few hours about how much better we were than everyone else, and then finally tracked down Leana before parting ways to go to our respective dinner reservations. I had to eat early, because I would have a 3:00 wake up call the next morning to make my 5:50 am start.

I hit the sack around 7:30, and was just drifting off when I heard what sounded like someone bouncing a racquetball off the wall in the next room. It was getting louder and louder and more and more frequent. What the fuck? Were they bouncing two now? It took me several long and annoyed minutes to realize that it was the fireworks show outside. Finally, it ended and I drifted back off to sleep. No sooner had the sandman born me off to the land of Nod, when I started hearing some strange sounds. Little by little, the pieces fell together and I realized that I was listening to an instrumental rendition of Under the Sea. I opened my eyes, and there, out the huge french doors that overlooked the lagoon I could see a giant, red, light-up octopus doing something that looked like the "Walk Like an Egyptian" dance. This was Illuminations, one of Disney's oldest, and certainly most in need of re-imagineering attractions.

It sounds like I'm complaining, but actually I'm not. I was just a little miffed at having to run a half marathon the next day. It was my first night in Disney World, and rather than going on rides and watching a fireworks show, I was elbowing through fat women in purple stocking up on a year's supply of Sport Beans, and going to bed at 7:30 while the Most Magical Place on Earth went on with the magic without me.

The Half Marathon

The morning went more or less without incident, and Angry escorted me to the staging area before the start at around 4:30 in the morning. I did a few silly walks to warm up, and then we sat around for awhile making sure that we really were superior to everyone else. A toy soldier (from Toy Story) saw me doing high knee sprints and yelled things at me through a bullhorn. I wanted to keep warming up, but my stomach was feeling a little bit iffy. I hadn't been able to eat my usual pre-race breakfast and I thought that doing more strides might make me puke even before the race began. Maybe it was the bad Disney food, I have no idea, but I decided to sit still, ignore my sour stomach, and hoping it wouldn't give me any trouble later. And then it was time to leave my sweats with Angry and start making my way towards the starting line about half a mile away. Now I was alone.

After waiting in the miserably long line for the bathroom and then the walk to the start, I barely had time to squeeze into the A Corral and elbow my way up a few spots from the very back before Mickey, Goofy, and Donald said a few words and they sent us on our Merry, Magical way. The course was crowded, and I spent the first mile weaving through people to try to find space to run a comfortable pace. It was very dark on some of the roads in backstage Disney, and I had to concentrate pretty hard to find a clear path for the first few miles. Every time it seemed to be opening up, we would take an on/off ramp and everyone would be crammed into one narrow lane again. My watch was set to keep me between a 7:45 and 8:15 mile, but I couldn't hear it beeping in all the melee, couldn't look down in the maelstrom of flying elbows and ankles, and every time I did manage to look down, I couldn't see the face in the gloom. (If you haven't figured it out, I'm in the mood to use SAT words today). The few times I did get to see the face in the first hour before the sun came up, I was pleased to see numbers in the high 7's, usually between 7:30's and 7:50's.

We ran from behind Epcot to the Magic Kingdom, where all the characters were out waiting for us. Generic 19th-century types in big, poofy dresses cheered for us on Main St. USA, Pooh waved to us from in front of the Peter Pan ride in Fantasy Land, Cinderella looked like she didn't give a shit and whispered something to Prince Charming as I ran through her castle, and Captain Jack Sparrow and his crew waved at us and yelled salty encouragement from The Pearl that was inexplicably set up backstage.

It wasn't until around mile 8, running past the Grand Floridian resort and heading toward the golf courses that the sun began to come up. Somewhere between miles 8 and 9, as we were running through the golf courses, I saw a wheelchair up ahead. As I got closer I recognized the unmistakable setup of Rick and Dick Hoyt! They're from Massachusetts, so this wasn't the first race that I'd run at the same time as them, but it was the first time I'd actually seen them on the course. Usually they finished miles ahead of me, and as inspiring as the story is, it always stung a bit to have my ass handed to me by a man in his late 60's pushing his grown son in a wheelchair. But here they were right in front of me, and I was going to pass them easily!!! As you might expect, the entire race around them was supercharged. The spectators cheer and scream extra loud as Team Hoyt runs by, and all the runners run a little bit taller and a little bit harder. Everyone wants to wish them luck. A man next to me asked Dick how he was feeling. Mr. Hoyt waited a second to see if the man would run on, but when he repeated the question, Dick let out a grunt that sounded like, "great". I was so overcome with emotion, not only to be in the presence of a story that had been so inspiring to me (and everyone else who knows it), but also because I was so excited to be finally passing them in a race. It really showed how far I'd come in the past year. I lifted my head and knees up high and ran just that much faster. Once I passed them I continued to have goosebumps, and felt just slightly choked up... then sick. Then nauseous. I had been running comfortably in the low 7:50's for the past 8 and a half miles, and now passing the Hoyts was just enough to push me from feeling "uncomfortable" to making me feel like I was going to puke all over my shoes... or Ricky Hoyt. There were a few long moments where I thought it actually might happen, that I might just turn my head to the side and puke right on Rick Hoyt's head.

I slowed down for a little while, and then tried to revive my pace to where it had been before I passed the Hoyts, but my stomach never truly recovered. Luckily, Team Hoyt never passed me back, or else I think that my stomach and my race would have been sunk. My last 5K my pace plummeted to an average of roughly 8:15 per mile. As I ran a quick Out and Back around Epcot and under Spaceship Earth people were sprinting by all around me, but I didn't care. I felt ill. I was running just exactly as hard as I could without puking all over my shoes. Angry spotted me a few yards from the finish and I yelled, "I'm going to vomit!!!!!!!!!" as I ran by. I barely held it together for an 8-minute mile pace for the last .2 miles into the finish.

I finished in 1:46:14, not quite making my goal of averaging sub-8:00 miles, but still good enough for a 12:27 PR. But here's the most amazing part (and thank the Disney Marathon for this one):

Overall Place: 659 / 12434; top 5%
Gender Place: 127 / 7181; top 2%
Division Place: 22 / 860; top 2.5%

Not to take anything away from the over 12 thousand people who came in behind me, but the fact that I made top 5% overall, and the top 2% of women is simply comical.

I staggered through the finishing area and got my Donald Half Marathon Finisher's medal and immediately set to work rehydrating and refueling. A volunteer was the first person all day to read my name off my bib. "Claire, are you okay?" she asked. I was still fighting a rendez-vous with breakfast, and probably looked pretty green. I nodded and did my best to smile. "Make sure you stretch lots tonight," she warned me. Like this was revolutionary new advice? Before leaving the restricted finishing area, I walked through the Goofy tent where they cut off my orange wrist band and replaced it with a blue one, meaning I'd finished the half marathon within the time limit (3.5 hours). Then I had to walk through one of a dozen lanes of Disney backdrops with photographers standing at each one. I took one look at the whole setup, and just walked right behind one of the photographers as he lined up a shot. Leave the grinning half marathon shot for the 3 hour folks who had never covered the distance before.

Left: This lady is not me, but her picture was in with mine. Some people packed for a week when they went to run this marathon. How many elite marathoners have you seen run with a camelbak AND a handheld water bottle? In a race where there's an aid station every mile?!
By the time I found Angry I was shivering. The morning was still cool and brisk (it was only 8 o'clock after all), and now that I'd stopped moving my sweaty clothes were really making me cold. Despite changing my shirt and putting on a jacket, I shivered the whole way back to the hotel. It probably took me nearly an hour from the time I finished until Angry and I boarded the monorail back towards the hotel, but as we passed by the course around mile 9 or 10, it was still way more crowded than anything I'd seen from about mile 2 on. It was incredible, the middle of the pack runners were only around the 10-mile mark now, more than 2 and a half hours into the race! We weren't too surprised to see that in the crowd, among all the people already racing in their race t-shirts, were hundreds of purple singlets. God bless TITs! They make me look so good!

Recovery

Right: I take an ice bath to try to recover from the half marathon and get ready for the marathon the next day.
I got back to the hotel, and after taking a hot shower to stop shivering, I drew a cold bath and dumped bucket after bucket of ice into the tepid water. Then Angry was nice enough to give me a massage that hurt so badly that I had to bite my pillow to keep from screaming. Hours later, I still had a tooth imprint on the back of my right hand from where I'd bitten down when he found a particularly tight knot in my calf. I sucked down bottle after bottle of Nuun and Powerade, and ate all the healthy food I could get my hands on (which wasn't much, stuck in the resort).

We went to the Crystal Palace for lunch where we had lunch with Pooh, Tigger, Eeyore, and Piglet, and then headed back to the hotel to hang out by the pool and wait for Jen who was coming up from Tampa for the evening. Jen was a Riot with a capital R. She turned up with a pink gift bag, stuffed with pink tissue paper, and all kinds of pink presents inside. She won Angry and me over with her funny little southern accent and we started an aggressive but unsuccessful campaign to get her to come back to Orlando one more time before we left.

Once the sun began setting, it was time to meet up with Cranky and his sister for dinner. I chowed down until I thought I was going to explode, and then came back to the hotel to turn in by 9:30. The dancing octopus had already come and gone by the time Jen and Angry tucked me in, but I was still tossing and turning about an hour later. Strange as it may sound, Angry will back me up that we had the loudest sheets in the world in our room.

The Marathon

The wake-up call came again at 3:00, and I was more conservative with breakfast and more liberal with coffee than I had been the day before. After forgetting my chip and number in the room, Angry and I finally hit the monorail at about 4:15 and headed to meet Leana and Cranky at the start. The monorail broke down some 500 times between our stop and our connection to Epcot, so by the time we got there, we were about half an hour later than expected and I had to go to the bathroom so bad I thought I was going to have to make a mess in the monorail car.

If you haven't figured it out, I'm a finicky pooper, especially when my routine is all messed up. No matter what I did on marathon morning, I just couldn't get my intestines to feel right. We found Cranky and Leana when we finally arrived at the start, but barely had time to say our good mornings before it was time to leave Angry and hit the bathrooms one last time before the starting line. Cranky went ahead to Corral A while Leana went on to Corral C, leaving me alone to find my place in Corral B. In a fit of optimism, I had picked up a wrist band with the splits I would need to run a 3:40 marathon and put it on this morning, but when it came time to find my place in the corral, I really couldn't even imagine getting through a marathon today, let alone racing one. When I spotted the guy with the 4-hour balloons, I lined up behind him and did my best to stay invisible while I listened to an geek that looked just like Dave Coulier (from Full House) talk about the Hoyts.

Far too soon, Mickey, Goofy, and Donald stood up again to make their speeches, the fireworks went off, and it was time to run. Where I was in the crowd, people started running about 200 yards before the start line, and I just couldn't be assed. Eventually I begrudgingly started shuffling when I realized that I might lose sight of the 4 hour guy in the crowd. The last thing I wanted right now was to be running a marathon. I was having déjà vu, hadn't I been through all this before?

The first mile wasn't so much a fight to get going, since the corrals did away with many of the power walkers that seed themselves at the front, as it was a struggle to keep my eye on the 4-hour balloons. I and a couple hundred other people all wanted to be bestest buddies with the 4-hour guy, and with the course making a lot of twists and turns in the dark and onto offramps that went from 3 lanes down to one, it was taking all my concentration to stay within view of the guy. When I finally did get a glimpse of my watch about 3 miles in, I was astounded to see that he was leading us at about an 8:30 minute mile, or around 3:45 pace.

From miles 2 to 3 we ran around the World Showcase in Epcot. It was really exciting to run through the deserted park (well, except the 12,000 runners) at night and see all the buildings all lit up. Then the 4-hour balloon guy ducked into the shadows, leading us out of the park and backstage onto a 1-lane service road again. Right then, the other half of the marathon field that had run a different first 5K than we had, merged onto the course with us. Someone's arm smacked my arm, and I was afraid that they had hit the stop button on my watch. While I was looking down, trying to tell in the dark if the seconds were still ticking away, SMACK! my leg hit something. Some asshole had tried to save us from some obstruction in the road by putting an even bigger obstruction – a traffic cone – right in front of it. And now I was flying through the air, and the traffic cone was coming with me. I put my other foot down to catch my fall, and caught the cone instead, kicking it in front of me. Then my other foot tried to catch my fall, and I caught the cone again on the way down. Finally, on the third try I managed to step forward far enough to clear the cone, landing like a figure skater. Let me tell you, those cones are harder than you would think if you've only ever hit them with your car. In the split seconds I was pulling a Peter Pan over the cone, some smartass woman right behind me said to the woman next to her, "I don't want to trip and fall... just like that!" What a bitch!

"Are you okay?" someone asked next to me. I looked over, and it was Dave Coulier in the visor.
"Yeah, I'll be fine," I said. I would have a nasty bruise on my shin and the sides of my calves, but the only thing that was really harmed was my ego. "Guess I should look where I'm going." Since Dave Coulier and I were both chasing the 4-hour guy, we wound up running shoulder-to-shoulder. Since the ice had already been broken, and I was desperate for a distraction from the marathon that I wanted very much to forget that I was running, I decided to befriend Dave Coulier. Anyway, geeks are easy to engage in conversation. They wear that stupid logo so that you'll ask them the magic question: "Which Ironman did you do?" I asked. And that's how I wound up listening to Dave Coulier tell his life story in the long "backstage" miles from miles 3 to 16. He would stop and the water stops, and I would charge on ahead (since I was running with a bottle), but we managed to stay together.

Once he finished telling his life story about his amazing year where he was doing Ironman Florida ("Florida"), the Goofy Challenge ("Goofy"), and the Harpoon Brewery to Brewery ride (which he didn't know enough to call the "B2B," I noticed), I expected him to ask about me (far more interesting to me than his stupid life anyway). He never did. I was itching like crazy for the chance to slip in the fact that I, too had done an ironman, and that I, too, could ride 150 miles in one day. And as far as Goofy... well, duh! But he just wouldn't ask. Eventually he started telling me inspiring stories (or stories that were meant to be inspiring, is that what the stories about his ironman and the B2B were supposed to be as well?). "Do you know who Rick and Dick Hoyt are?" Dave Coulier asked.

"Yeah, of course!" I said. "I passed them right around here yesterday morning." Then I told him my funny story about how I'd been so excited to see them that I'd almost puked on Rick Hoyt. He didn't seem to appreciate me interrupting his story, or my apparent disrespect for the benevolent saints of endurance sports. He didn't even snicker at my story.

"Oh! You're doing Goofy too?" he asked instead, legitimately surprised. What did he think I was?! In fact, I had run 15 minutes faster than he had the day before. Then he went back to preaching the wondrous virtues of Dick Hoyt (which I am not for a second criticizing). "You know the guy ran a 1:30 yesterday... Pushing that wheelchair. AND he's in his late 60's!"

"No he didn't," I said. "He sure can run, but he finished behind me yesterday. I definitely would have noticed if he passed me back. When I passed him I was moving much faster than he was. He finished in about 1:50."

"No, I checked the results," Dave Coulier insisted. Dude, I was there! I wanted to say. He finished behind me. "Trust me," Dave Coulier stated. (In case there is any doubt, they finished in just under 1:52, nearly 5 minutes behind me. If you don't believe me, check here.)

We passed the 4-hour guy around mile 6. We ran through the Magic Kingdom, where Cinderella's Fairy Godmother was waving her wand chanting "bibbity, bobbity, boooo!", past Splash Mountain which was closed, and by a whole slu of characters. I was beginning to feel the effects of the half marathon the day before, and felt like it was just a matter of time before my pace started to give out. I warned Dave Coulier around the halfway point that I wouldn't be able to stay with him forever, but to my surprise it was Dave Coulier who dropped back never to return again around the 16-mile mark near the waste water treatment plant behind Animal Kingdom. (Dave Coulier eventually finished in 4:09, some 12 minutes behind me.)

The strangest thing was that my legs had started to feel tired and sore around mile 9 or 10, and I kept waiting to blow to smithereens like I did in Hartford, but I never did. I'm beginning to find that when I run a marathon as part of something longer (a 50K, an ironman, this stupid Goofy Challenge), it actually hurts less than when I run a marathon fresh. Sure, there is more pain earlier on, but I have yet to hit that level of pain that I hit in the last 10K of the Hartford, Boston, or Cape Cod marathons, for example. I'm sure that it has to do with starting out at a more conservative pace (and I'm sure there's a lesson in there somewhere, if only I could figure out what it was). I was going through more and more rapid cycles of highs and lows, but there was still a high after every low.

Miles 16 through 18 had us running through the Animal Kingdom. I had dreaded this stretch since this was where Angry's race fell apart last year. But when I got there I found I quite enjoyed it. Even if the jungle was fake, it was pretty, and I was happy to have something to look at after the 5 miles of "backstage" since the Magic Kingdom. As I was running through "Africa," I came up behind a guy who was juggling. "Oh. my. god. You have got to be kidding me!" I said out loud right as I passed him. At least I was passing him. All the characters and cast members thought he was great and yelled things like, "Now that's talent!" but I thought it was just fucking retarded. Why would you do something like that? He wasn't wearing a shirt for a charity, so he had just decided to do this, for no reason that I could discern other than to be obnoxious. What a fucking moron. And worst of all, why had it taken me 18 miles to pass this douche bag?! To my supreme satisfaction, between the miles 20 and 21 markers (now back outside the park), we did a half-mile out-and-back, and the juggling clown had fallen back several minutes in the 3 miles since I'd passed him, and he looked like he was suffering. Maybe you should put down the balls, nutsack, and you'll feel better! I thought. This moment was a low point, by the way. I was a bit crabby.

Sometime before reaching Hollywood Studios (mile 22.5), we passed a giant set of speakers playing You Can Fly from Peter Pan. Cheesy as it sounds, this spot gave me a major boost. I knew I was slowing down a little bit, but I could feel that I wasn't going to have to run any 11-minute miles today. In fact, I was still able to nudge myself under 9-minute miles. I just couldn't seem to stay there for a very long time. Every time I started feeling like hell, I would reach into my pocket and pull out a fistful of Skittles (some starting to show signs of aging from my sweat-soaked shorts) and shove them in my mouth. I kept choking on the hard, sugary centers that were left after I'd chewed up most of the candy, but they were working just as well as my gumdrops usually do.

Hollywood Studios (miles 22.5-24) were a major low point. That big, blue, fuzzy thing from Monsters, Inc, and a couple more characters I didn't recognize were out but I couldn't muster a smile or even a glance. I walked two water stops in a row, just to break up the monotony of plugging on. I was horrified when I saw the Tower of Terror looming right in front of me. It looked like it was on a hill, and I was aiming to run right up it, but thank god we turned before we got there.

Left: Me looking like hell and feeling like hell running through Hollywood Studios around mile 23
To Disney's credit, and my great relief, the entire last 4 miles of the marathon are through parks or resorts. So even though I thought my head would explode if I tried to get it around running another 2.5 miles after Hollywood Studios, at least I had something to look at. More and more people were walking, and I hit another high as we turned onto the boardwalk to run past the Dolphin and Swan hotels (temporary home to the Cranky clan) and the Yacht and Beach Club resorts, because I still felt okay. It was starting to look not only possible, but likely that I would break 4 hours today... If everyone would get out of my way, that is! We were running along a narrow footpath at this point, and the people who had stopped to walk weren't moving to the side to get out of the way. I was at that point where any movement other than lunging forward as fast as I could was way more effort than I could fathom. I passed one clump of assholes walking 3 abreast. "Move to the side, please!" I said as I passed them. I didn't even say it with attitude. The leftmost asshole came sprinting by me about 15 seconds later, and ran about 50 yards ahead before stopping to walk again. Yep, he sure showed me!

Mile 25 lead us back into Epcot and running around the World Showcase. I just wanted this to be over so badly, I could hardly stand it. I ran through country, after country, after country, and finally turned off towards Spaceship Earth. Angry was standing just underneath it, around where the 26-mile marker must have been. I spotted him from about 100 yards away and pointed at him. He pointed back and then looked at his watch. A picture of his face at that moment would have been worth 100 finishing photos. When he looked at his wrist you could read "What the fuck?!" across his forehead clear as day. As I drew closer, he held up 4 fingers and yelled, "SUB-4!!!"

Sub-4?! I was not only going to go sub-4, I was actually going to BEAT my time from Hartford! "PR MOTHERFUCKER!" I yelled at the top of my lungs (and immediately regretted it... one shouldn't yell the f-word in Disney World where there are urchins about). Then I found the strength of 10 men and started running faster than I'd run all day.

A second later, I knew sprinting was a mistake. The nausea that I had been holding at bay all day hit me like a ton of bricks. I began looking for an open spot along the sidelines where I could boot without making a mess all over anyone, and started cursing Angry for fucking up my PR so close to the end. (I never take responsibility for anything when I can blame Angry for it). I slowed to a walk, getting ready for everything to come up and started taking deep breaths. I walked past my designated puke point, and kept walking for another minute or so, not sure which way my stomach was going to go. Meanwhile everyone was yelling my name (which was written on my bib) and urging me to keep running. "You're almost there!" I wanted to take a baseball bat to all of them. Of COURSE I wanted to run the last .2 miles, but I wanted to finish without throwup on my shirt even more. Finally the feeling passed, and I ran very cautiously to the finish line.

Left: This picture didn't come out how I would hope. I look like a total loser! Right: Me looking like a TOTAL tool at the finish line. It looks more like someone tripped me and I'm about to go flying than elation at finishing.
The race had been getting to me for most of the last hour as I realized that I was going to hit roughly 4 hours. As I crossed the finish line in about 3 hours and 57 minutes, I slowed to a crawl and let out what was going to be a yell of triumph, but came out more like an embarrassing screech of a woman who's seen a mouse, (not the 6-foot plush variety with coattails). A lump welled up in my throat, and I broke out in goosebumps. It wasn't so much that I was proud of myself, or even that I'd suffered so badly in the last 4 hours. I had just been concentrating so hard for the last 4 hours, for the last week, holding it together as my life was falling apart through Christmas, and concentrating so hard on running all fall... it was all that tension releasing when I crossed that finish line. I've had this sort of thing happen before, when workouts have gutted me so badly that I can't control my emotion. I was on the brink of tears and might have cried if I hadn't burst out in an enormous shit-eating grin every time I made eye contact with someone.

Official Time: 3:57:25 (PR by 1 minute and 34 seconds)
Overall Place: 1831 / 14949; top 12%
Gender Place: 419 / 7143; top 6%
Division Place: 84 / 1295; top 6%

Again, my high percentages say more about the field than they do about my own performance.

Combined Goofy Time: 5:43:39
Overall Place: 286 / 3323; top 8%
Gender Place: 60 / 3322; top 2%
Division Place: 8 / 130; top 6%




The Aftermath

Right: Cranky and I show off our finishers' medals for just long enough to get to the nearest shower.
I emerged from the restricted runners' area and found Angry, Cranky, and Cranky's sister waiting for me. Thankfully, I forgot all about being choked up when I saw my friends, so I didn't make an ass of myself by blubbering in front of them. "I set a PR by 1 minute!" I said to Cranky, sticking my index finger about half an inch from his face. Cranky himself had run roughly 3:40, and looked as fresh as a daisy. Suddenly, out of nowhere, Angry pulled out a can of Axe Body Spray and started spraying me from head to toe with it. "Stop that! What the hell are you doing?!" I squealed, waving my hands in my face to get the stuff out of my mouth and nose.

"You smell!" he said with a big old grin on his face, then he aimed for my lower extremities.

Once the original glow had worn off, I realized that I really, really had to use the bathroom. I felt like my insides had been put through a blender, and I needed to break Claire's Number 1 Rule of... You Know What... right now. I ran back to the porta-potties, but I couldn't get relief. "Leana's going to be finishing in about half an hour," Angry said. "Did you want to wait for her?"

"Angry, I need to go back to the hotel. I don't feel well at all." So our whole crew started making our way ever so slowly back toward the monorail. While riding the monorail, I started to feel woozy, like I might puke in my lap. I showered quickly, tried to evacuate the poison from my lower intestine (unsuccessfully), and Angry and I hurried back to Epcot for our lunch reservation in Japan. Walking around the park made me nauseous again, and I had to beg Angry to stop and wait for the nausea and abdominal cramps to stop before we could walk the rest of the way to the restaurant. I had no idea how I was going to eat anything.

Left: After the marathon I spent most of the rest of the day in the bathroom.
Meanwhile, we were walking past mile 25 of the marathon, and hundreds of people (many of whom were dressed in purple) were streaming by for a 6-hour finish. They all looked so excited and tired at the same time as they power walked by, and the irrational tears welled up in my throat all over again. Meanwhile Angry was making mean-spirited comments about the kind of person that would take more than 6 hours to run a marathon. "You know, Angry..." I said, doing a pretty good job of keeping my voice from cracking. "Finishing a marathon is probably a way bigger deal for these people than it is for you or me..." I paused for a second to get my composure back. "...And this is just such a happy day for them..." my voice cracked. "And I think..." I had to pause to get the rest of the sentence out, "... I just think it's so beautiful!"

Angry was smart enough not to comment on the fact that I was apparently fighting back tears, but the expression on his face said it all. I mean, isn't it me who's always down on the purple people and the kinds of folks who think that a marathon finish line is as beautiful a miracle as the miracle of birth? And here I was, a walking Hallmark card for goodness' sake. The important thing is to finish! Group hugs! All that crap...

Alright, I'll admit it. Finish lines do crazy things to your emotions.

With a little help from Pepto Bisomol, I forced down a portion of my lunch at the habachi grill before promptly depositing it back in the toilet before leaving the restaurant. Angry and I then sat on benches in Italy, Germany, and Norway for the next few hours (never far from a restroom), people watching and making fun of all the people walking around in their finishers' medals. Then we met up with Cranky and his sister, and I made a point of staring into the eyes of every dipshit still wearing a finisher's medal and making sure that I had no discernable limp. With some help from Cranky's sister's antacids, I was even able to force down some dinner. Somehow, my legs were fine and I had not problems walking, but I couldn't be too far from a bathroom in case it came out one end or the other.

If I thought it was obnoxious to see people walking around with their finisher's medals and t-shirts on on Sunday, it got increasingly annoying as we saw them wearing their t-shirts and medals on Monday and Tuesday as well. I mean these people had to get undressed, take a shower, and then get dressed and put the medal and the t-shirt back on each successive day. One guy that Angry, Leana, and I saw in Hollywood Studios on Monday afternoon was clanging around in both his Goofy AND Mickey finisher medals. We all hoped that he would get on a rollercoaster and his medals would smack him in the face at 60 miles per hour.

Also, so many of the people I saw walking around in their Goofy medals and t-shirts, all I could think was, You? Really? I had fancied that the challenge of Goofy would attract the more serious runners looking for a new challenge. Most of the people I saw walking around in Goofy medals were the dregs you expect to find at the back of any other race: The fat man with the beer belly and a beard down to his man boobs, the beefy football fan type who looks like he ran a marathon on a bet, the round rolley-poley women in purple who have 12 pounds of gear and run at a 12-minute mile... From the looks of it, the Goofy runners were just the craziest ones, and I didn't like how that reflected on me. True, of course the most obnoxious ones were the ones most likely to wear their medals for an inappropriate amount of time, but it didn't really seem like such an achievement if everyone I saw wearing the t-shirt was obese. I, just like anyone else, understand the feeling of being proud of yourself and not wanting the pride and feeling of accomplishment to fade. But still, I don't need to wear my medal for a month straight to remember that I ran a marathon. In my opinion, you may wear the finisher's medal until you shower. Then it is time to take it off. You can wear the race t-shirt once you have finished the race (not before), and for the rest of the day. If it is your first marathon, you get one extra day out of the medal and t-shirt, but once your shirt starts smelling it's time to take them both off.

Left: Angry fits into my Boston jacket... just barely.
On a slightly hypocritical note, upon Angry's urging, I elected to wear my Boston Marathon jacket the day after the marathon (because my Goofy shirt already smelled bad). As we were standing in line for the Rockin' Rollercoaster, a man in a Mickey Marathon t-shirt leaned over and pulled my sleeve. "Is that a finisher's jacket, or did you have to buy it?" he asked.
"I had to buy it," I said, truthfully. Hey, he didn't ask if I'd RUN Boston, I didn't have to tell him that I did it as a bandit.
"Well it's a really nice jacket," he said. I know, I thought to myself. That's why I bought it!
"Isn't that cheating?" Leana said, when I told her the story.
"No!" I said. "He didn't say ANYTHING about running the marathon, he just asked if I bought the jacket. I can tell the truth about that one."

And just in case this post didn't have enough pictures already, here are the pictures from the rest of the trip:

The characters wouldn't leave our table until somebody took a picture. Right after this Tigger was throwing gang signs with Angry.

I asked Piglet to crouch down in the picture we took with my camera, but this one turned out better, so I look shorter.

Someone explain to me what this one means.

Cranky and I shuffle back to the monorail. Hey, go easy, we both just ran a marathon!

Best. photo. of. the. weekend. Angry and I had a butterfly race. He won, but I have lots of good excuses for why that happened.

The Kona Café became a running joke throughout the weekend.

Angry and I are founding the Jen fan club.

Angry got pictures with characters too. We decided that Eeyore would be the best character to be played by a hung over college student.

My only complaint about the week was that Jen didn't come back for an encore.

See?! I am too tall enough to go on the rides!

More proof that I wore a skirt. Angry thought my back looked ripped in this picture. I think it just looks lumpy.