Donald Duck Half Marathon – 2013 race recap

Saturday January 12^th, 2013 – half day

I was up before my alarm with only about 2 hours of sleep – wonderful.  But I was feeling good so no worries.

Got dressed and caught up with my brother and we headed out to the bus from the Boardwalk at about 3:10 am.  Last year we had stayed at Port Orleans French Quarter and we had gotten on the bus just before 4 and with all the traffic back up we missed the initial start and I had to put in an extra mile of running to catch my corral as it was starting.  I didn’t want a repeat of that this year so we got there nice and early and there weren’t many people there yet which helped to cut the “are we going to be late?” stress.

Being in the Runners World Challenge group my brother was eligible for the Race Retreat and to start in corral B.  He decided in the end to forgo that and head into corral E with me – he had an injury in the fall and he didn’t want to be in the way so he decided to stay back in the slower corral.  So we hung out and wandered in the area prior to bag check – as they started calling runners to head through to the final staging area for the walk to the corrals we hung back and finally went through the tents around 4:30 am after a big portion of the crowd had thinned out.

My first thought was “this is how people get hurt” – they still hadn’t opened the gate keeping everyone in the staging area and people were squished in like sardines and more people were still coming through the tents.  Luckily things went pretty smooth once they opened the gate but it was still a very long slooooow walk to the corals.

As we wandered into corral E near the back and hovered around waiting for the start, I was surprised to see a 3:00-3:15 pace bunny line up his group in front of me.  I was shooting for 2:10 so I realized at that point that I was going to be doing a fair bit of dodging early on to try to be able to get into a comfortable pace with other runners going a similar speed.  Then as I heard the announcers talking about the various folks crossing the start line I realized that one of the 2 pace bunnies I would have wanted to follow was 2 corrals ahead of me – at that point I knew it was going to be a pretty rough race.

So combine that I knew I was going to have to do extra work to get a clear path, the humidity and the knowledge that the heat was coming and I could tell I was going to be a bit frustrated with the race.  Not a great mindset to be in when starting a race.  But I put it out of my head and went out to run my race as close to my way as I could under the circumstances.

In the end I finished with a time of 2:20:35 – about 10 minutes slower than I wanted which doesn’t sound too bad taken straight especially when compared to my time of 2:38:24 last year.  And don’t get me wrong – I am not trying to be negative here – it was my best time in a half marathon race in many years but if you look at the actual effort that I put in to get that time (based on my Garmin readings) I probably would have finished closer to the 2 hour mark on a less crowded course.

I went out with the intention of taking a picture of every mile marker on the race – I got the first one and then after that I was finding it difficult to get through the crowd to get to the markers to get photos.  But the first mile marker does give you an indication of the humidity that everyone was dealing with – even the billboard was sweating.

I did however get a very good video of running down Main Street in Magic Kingdom – hopefully I can get it put up on Youtube and put a link here shortly.

I stopped counting the number of people that would run in front of me near a race photographer and stop, causing me to have to dodge.  It happened at least 4 times in Magic Kingdom alone – in fact I had someone stop right in front of me as we were going through Cinderella’s Castle – the most narrow / choked point of the whole course and he just stopped to take it all in.  Luckily by then I was watching everyone around me very closely.

I think in the end I spent about a quarter of the run to Magic Kingdom running on the grass beside the road just to get a clear path – I could definitely feel the impacts of the running on uneven ground in my feet and knees after the race was done.

My brother asked me after he was done if they had narrowed the course because he thought there were more choke points this year than last and he felt that he had to dodge a lot more than he should have.  He was running injured, specifically going slow and in the corral where a 3 hour pace bunny was located and he still spent most of the race dodging people as well.

So I’m not exactly sure what happened here – I didn’t see the same issues from the same corral on the full marathon day so why the apparent issues during the half?  There could be a few:

• there were 3000 more runners finish the half versus the full and those extra runners might have clogged things up more than expected
• lots of half marathoners are relative newcomers to the running race scene and may not really have the running etiquette down (you could really tell the experienced runners who would point to the open spot they were heading to so you didn’t cut them off or who would give a hand sign to signal they were stopping to walk – I definitely learned some things by watching those runners).  Even a couple near misses or slowdowns caused by  an honest mistake made by a greener runner could have impacts far down the course when things are congested (think of a car accident that can have an impact on traffic for a long time after it has occurred and even cleaned up)
• Disney may have generically assigned the Goofy runners to corrals based on their expected marathon times – so in my case I was put in E because I put in an expected time of around 5 hours.  The Goofy runners then also get the same corral for the half and maybe Disney uses different criteria for the strictly half runners when assigning corrals – as shown by the 3 hour pace bunny.  So as a full runner training to be under 5 hours if I put in a strong half run I would probably be expected to be in the 2:10 to 2:15 range but I was in a corral with runners shooting for around 3 hours.  If this happened to all the 3000 Goofy runners the mismatch of speeds could have caused grief as well.

I don’t know if anyone else experienced this as well but I did hear from some other Goofy runners that were shooting for faster speeds on the half and had issues with the crowd.  And there were definitely some impatient faster runners who got caught in traffic as evidenced by the 5’ tall blond girl who tried to push past me when I got trapped between a group of walkers and a fence.

I know it doesn’t sound it but I am not trying to be negative here – I am just disappointed that I didn’t get to see more of the great course, entertainment and Magic Kingdom because I had to spend all of my time monitoring all the other runners very closely.  I could never get into a zone and just run and enjoy myself and that was kind of disappointing.

But things did clear up a little near the end enough for me to enjoy myself – especially once the sun came out – although that did bring the heat as well.  The humidity was so bad that my running hat couldn’t wick and evaporate fast enough – at one point I saw water falling in front of me and I thought for a second that it was rain and then I realized it was just sweat dripping off my hat.  Lovely image I know – my apologies.

But in the end I had a good finish and I felt very good after it all was said and done…but Disney – what the hell?  No Coke at the finish line?  Bah!

I give Disney credit – with the number of runners and the heat they had plenty of water and Powerade available on the course and at the finish.

After sitting in the bus on the way back to the hotel I got some back spasms and major pains in the muscles in my back – mostly due to how I must have been holding myself while I was running.  Obviously I was holding myself too rigid and I paid the price for a few minutes until I could stretch it out and take some Tylenol.

I ended up having a short nap after and went for a walk with my wife around the Boardwalk and to Hollywood Studios to stretch out the legs and knees and try to work through the pounding they took while running beside the road.

One thing I realized I missed was having a cold shower / ice bath to reduce any swelling or pain and this may have contributed to the issues I was having with my legs.  I made sure I remembered for the next day.

Supper was simple – a beer and pepperoni pizza on the Boardwalk with a few slices left over for breakfast.  Awesome way to relax.

We then did a shopping excursion over to the Beach and Yacht Club resorts to find a hat – my running hat was obviously unusable for anything but running after the race in the morning and I needed to find something to keep the sizzle down – if you look at the picture above you can almost see the smoke coming off the back of my head.

I ended up going to bed early and fell to sleep by around 8:30pm while my wife went on a shopping excursion around the Boardwalk and Epcot.   Got a good solid rest going into Sunday.