I've been slowly working on a post about the races I'm planning on running this year. I have a nice progression from 10K in April to a half marathon in August to a full marathon in November. There will be some other races thrown in there as well, but the 10K, half, full will be the main focuses of my training for most of this year. They won't be the main focus of my running energy though. I'm poised to realize a running goal that I've had for two years. I am planning on running the half marathon at Disney World in January.
The excitement that I get just writing that sentence is unreasonably intense. I have no idea why I find the idea of this half so exciting, but I've been stoked from the moment my wife said we should do the half. I've been wanting to run a runDisney event since I was reading about the Dopey Challenge while we were in Disney World two years ago. I find the Dopey Challenge totally crazy and really have no desire to try that (just the entry fee alone is totally insane), but I'm very happy to be doing the half-marathon. A half feels like an event but it's not so long that I'll be totally fried for the rest of the weekend. The half is also on Saturday so we can spend Sunday doing the parks before heading home on Monday.
I've already booked our room for the weekend, and have started looking at flights. There is a flight that leaves nice and early, 5:30 am, and gets to Orlando at 12:30. We need to get there early enough that we can make it to the expo to get our numbers and still have some time to check out at least one park. The races start ridiculously early so we'll have two very early wake up calls back to back, but that's a small price to pay for getting to do the race and having some kid free time at Disney World. (Yet another reason not to do the Dopey Challenge, four days in a row of ridiculously early wake up calls.)
My first marathon will be a huge focus of my running effort this year, but the Disney Half is the race that I am most looking forward to over the next year. I'm preparing myself to see my Monument Avenue 10K time slip from what I did last year (I was running so much faster on my weekly runs this time last year, I just don't see how I'm running at that level by April 1), and I'm uneasy about what I can do in the Patrick Henry Half after how much I struggled with my training last year (and had no chance to actually see how I could run after messing up my knee a few weeks before the race). I may run a few smaller races throughout the year. There's a 12K that I've run the last couple of years on Memorial Day (although I think we may be in DC for a baseball game this year), and we always do the cul-de-sac 5Ks in July. I would really like to run one of those all out this year. I like to run a 10K on Thanksgiving morning (I really want to run a course PR this year, I should be in pretty good shape coming off of the marathon a few weeks prior), and the Surf and Santa 5 miler has emerged as an annual must run event for the entire family (well, we walk it anyway). All of those races are much lower priorities than the Monument Avenue 10K, the Patrick Henry Half Marathon, and the Richmond Marathon. And those are not nearly as exciting as the Walt Disney World Marathon Weekend Half Marathon.
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