The Inaugural Tinker Bell 10k

After getting a glimpse of the medal for the Tinker Bell 10k I decided there was no way I was going to let my friends get the medal and not have one myself so I added the race to my line up a little late, and I’m sure glad I did!

If you saw the preview picture on Instagram of my Anna costume, I ended up making a few last minute changes so that there would be no mistaking who I was suppose to be, and with flat Summer laid out I was off to bed around 11 o’clock, for an early 4:45 wake up.



I can never say that I am so not a morning person enough!! I’m really not! I purposely stay at Paradise Pier every year so that I can roll out of bed, look out my window to check the corrals, fall into my costume and slither to the start line! This year was no exception, but thankfully I had a partner in crime who had the same game plan!

I met my friend Kirsten in the lobby at about 5:30 for a 6 am start time and we headed to the corrals together. For some reason, even though we were in the same corral for the half, Kirsten’s bib was for corral D so I decided I would drop back and join her. I’m a really social runner and having someone to talk to really makes all the difference to me.

If I’m being honest I wasn’t too thrilled with corral D. The company was great, don’t get me wrong, but we had no idea what the heck was going on ahead of us! We couldn’t hear the announcers, and didn’t even hear the start of the national anthem either! I was a bit disappointed with that. We also seemed to be held in the same place for a very long time! I am use to being in the earlier corrals and moving up after each corral left, but that didn’t seem to be the case this time.

Finally, after what felt like a really long time, it was our turn to go!! Again I was feeling like dropping back to corral D wasn’t that great of an idea because we were constantly stuck behind walkers. Now I have no issues with walkers, especially since I do run/walk intervals, but it added a new challenge as most of the paths were pretty narrow and quite difficult to pass on. I ended up going even slower then I had originally anticipated, but I reminded myself that I still had the half to run the next day so it was better to take it easy anyway!

After taking a pretty long tour of the backstage area we came into the park next to It’s a Small World in all it’s holiday glory!! Since we hadn’t taken any pics up to this point we decided this would be a great one to take, plus it didn’t require standing in a line!!



The 1 mile marker was set up right as we were exiting Toon Town to head back stage again and this bottle necked really bad! There was no running through it, and even walking posed a challenge.
After entering back into the parks near Splash Mountain, and running around the boarded up Thunder Mountain we were making our way into Fantasy Land when we spotted DisBroad Patty waiting outside the bathroom for DisBroad April, who is pregnant and was visiting all the restrooms along the way. We also spotted these fun peeps and decided to stop for a pic with them!



In all my trips to Disney I am fairly certain this was actually my very first picture with Jolly Holiday Mary, or Mary Poppins at all for that matter!! So I was very glad I stopped, and really the line wasn’t all that bad! After Kirsten and I took our pics with Mary and Bert we waited for DisBroads Amy, April, and Patty to do them same! Then we were off again and quickly lost them on the course. I told you it was pretty crowded!

After making a quick circle around Tomorrow Land and heading down Main Street USA we were on our way over to California Adventure! Once we hit Cars Land I looked at Kirsten and asked her if she wanted to take pics with Mater and Lightening McQueen, and of course her answer was YES!! The line didn’t look that long, but it ended up taking longer then I had expected, and that is when it happened! We were only a couple people from our turn and we saw the 16 min/mil pacer pass us!!



In all of the runDisney races I have done I have never even seen a pacer, more less been passed by one! We quickly got our photo and decided we needed to haul buns to get ahead of that little orange flag of death! Which was a bit of a chore since there was quite a crowd around her!

Thankfully we were able to get well in front of her before leaving the parks and never saw her again!
I really felt that the 10k was harder then it should have been for me and that started making me very nervous about doing the half marathon the next day! Kirsten and I both agreed to mostly walk the last 2 miles and we finished way slower then we had planned, but we finished none the less. Even though the race hadn’t gone as I had planned I was quite pleased to add this beauty to my collection!

          

What are your thoughts on runDisney adding the 10k distance to most of their race weekends? Have you had the chance to run a runDisney 10k yet?