The weekend I had been looking forward to for months finally came and I was sick! Sick as a dog most of the week before it. Friday afternoon we headed to Orlando. After checking into our hotel we made our way to Downtown Disney to catch the bus to the expo to pick up our race packets. The expo was a zoo! It was too crowded to really see or buy anything so we picked up our packets and headed out.
They had a wall with all the participants names on it.
My bib!!!
Race day we were out the door by 3:45 a.m and on our way to Epcot
After walking probably 3 miles we finally made it to our corral where we waited, and waited, and waited.....you get the idea. Lets just say we were at our corral around 4:45 and our start time was 6:15. We were there forever! It wasn't bad though. They had music blasting through there and everyone was having a good time.
The view from our corral. A big sea of people, bright lights and a jumbo screen showing the starting line which was around the corner.
They released corrals every 7 minutes, complete with fireworks every time. Though I think the first one had more of them. We were about half way back in our coral and we were still this far from the starting line when it was our turn.
Main Street in Magic Kingdom, it was about mile 6 I believe. It was PACKED! I am not sure why I envisioned open streets while I was running. I guess I thought I was an A corral runner with a 6 minute mile pace in my head. It was so crowded you really could not run which ended up working out since I was still very sick and having difficulty breathing so we walked over half of the race. I felt horrible that Crystal and Kevin had to wait for me. :(
Half way point! They were blasting "Girl on Fire" It is a women's race after all. Out of 26,000 participants only 1,000 were male.
I cried when I crossed the finish line. I am not sure if it was because of the pain, the fact it was over, not being able to breathe, being happy that I actually finished the race, or upset that it did not go as planned, but I cried. Right now I am happy with the outcome now that I have had time to digest all that went wrong and the fact that I was able to finish. For a while I was upset that I had finished much slower than I thought I would, that I held them back and I was just plan upset that I had trained so hard for it to all go wrong. But I did it. I did a half marathon and I am pretty proud of myself and ready for the next!
Final time 3 hours, 4 minutes and 11 seconds. I came in 12,779 place out of 22,721 finishers.
No comments:
Post a Comment