Tinker Bell Half Marathon 2014

Last year the Tinker Bell half marathon made me cry. I should have gotten a PR but I didn’t and  watching my PR slip away was heartbreaking. It was the first and only race that literally brought me to tears, but I am happy to report that this year that was not the case.

Since I had known my training had been lacking I wasn’t expecting much and decided that this year I wanted to PR in fun and I did just that!



I’m still not a fan of the 5 am start time, but once I’m up and going I’m glad to get it done early and still have all day to spend in the parks! Unlike the 10k the morning before there was no flat Summer laid out. Instead there was a balled up Summer laying on the sofa in the room, and when my alarm went off at 3:45 I grumbled a bit and begrudgingly rolled out of bed. After getting dressed and downing a protein shake I was ready to head down to the lobby to meet up with Kirsten again.

I have to say that the lobby was much busier that morning and the feel of the half marathon was very different than that of the 10k for sure! You definitely knew what the main event was, and we were hoping we were ready for it! We both have ran several half marathons before, but with the vision of the 10k sweepers still fresh in our minds we weren’t as confident as we normally would have been. In fact I posted this status update on Facebook and being blessed with awesome friends they had some wonderful answers for me!

 

After settling into corral C and taking the obligatory corral selfie I was feeling a little better about the mileage ahead of me, but only a little. The national anthem was sang with fireworks a blazing and shortly after that the wheelchair racer took off. For some reason this always chokes me up a bit, and usually brings a tear or two to my eye.

After the wheelchair racer was well on their way corral A was off, followed closely by corral B, and before I knew it was time for us to head out on our own 13.1 mile journey through the Disneyland Resort Parks and the streets of downtown Anaheim.


After making a loop around Disneyland resort we headed back stage, and then into California Adventure where the fountains for World of Color were on and absolutely beautiful!



From here we headed towards Cars Land, which is just amazing to run through when it is all lit up! I would also like to give runDisney huge props for the slight change of course from last year, and the added light to the paths that were really dark in the past! It was greatly appreciated!



This sign made me giggle a bit so I had to get a picture of it in case I needed to use it somewhere down the line. The other side said “Not Slow” but I couldn’t get the picture to come out with the spotlight shinning on the “sl”

After running around most of California Adventure we hit the 5k mark as we exited the park and headed across the way to the Disneyland park! It was in the area between parks that I noticed another great change runDisney added to control the flow of cross traffic, similar to what they do on the parade route, and that was greatly appreciated too, as there has been more then once that I almost plowed into a spectator trying to run across the course in front of me.

Once in Disneyland there were character picture ops aplenty, but after the run in with the sweepers the day before I opted to skip all of them but this one, that I mostly took for #3 since she loves puppies and kitties and is known to try and use “cute paws” on me.

 
After running through Disneyland, and hitting the last real restroom, under the Hungry Bear Restaurant, we were on our way through Downtown Disney and toward the amazing Red Hat ladies! I was completely surprised by them the first year, and I greatly anticipate seeing them every year, and they did not disappoint! They are hands down the most amazingly enthusiastic group of spectators I have ever seen!

  

After leaving the Red Hat Ladies and Downtown Disney behind it gets pretty quiet, and I knew there was nothing but the streets of Anaheim left to see. A little after mile 6 we stopped at the medical tent so I could get a band aid. When we were back stage at Disneyland I could feel that one of my toe nails were cutting the toe next to it so I wanted to prevent any further damage. I was a bit surprised to see as much blood as there was, but I put the band aid on and thankfully my shoe went back on with no issues and we were off again. These were some of my favorite signs from the neighborhood portion of the run.



There was also this sign in the business area of the course. Don’t worry my mom taught me well and I did not take the candy from the nice strangers on the street corner, but I did take a couple of the orange slices and they were quite heavenly!



Around mile 9 I stopped at another med tent, this time for some Tylenol. My hip had held up really well, but it was giving me some itchy sensations off and on so I wanted to be a bit proactive and take it before I absolutely needed it. It was at this stop that I lost Kirsten. She kept running and told me to catch up when I was done and I somehow passed her without seeing her. #SadTrombone

But I did find a couple of people from one of my Facebook running groups at the med tent and they invited me to run with them, so I did.  Just before mile 11 I happened to check my phone and noticed I had a missed call from DisBroad Patty, silly lady. I will text, Facebook, and tweet during a race, but I draw the line at answering the phone. ;)

There happened to be a text from her as well checking where I was. I was actually just behind her and the rest of the Tink DisBroads so she told me to stay at the mile 11 sign until I see them. As we approached the mile 11 sign I said good bye to my running partners and ran toward the sign when I heard a loud cheer yelling "Summer" and there they were! DisBroads April, Patty, Amy and Tania were already at the sign waiting for me!


With just over 2 miles left to go we decided to finish the race together, using the motto #NoDisBroadLeftBehind and in this case that DisBroad was me!! As we finished the race together, spirit fingers in the air, we were diverted to one side as there was a runner down receiving medical attention and I could feel tears welling up in my eyes. Yes, I'm that girl who cries over everything! His wife later posted in one of the Facebook groups I am a member calling him the "Lost Boy who tried to go to Neverland" and reported that he ended up having open heart surgery, but is expected to make a full recovery and their goal is to get him completely rehabilitated in time to run the Wine & Dine half in November!! Again this made me tear up a bit, but I was glad to hear was going home and doing well.

As we exited the finish line area and made our way toward the medals we came across runDisney’s Bob Hitchcock and he very graciously posed for a picture with us! He was so nice and his lighting crew even offered to light up our cell phone picture for us!! It was a very brief, but wonderful experience.



Now with an absolutely amazing race behind us what is in the DisBroads future? Rumor has it we will ALL be in Disney World next month for the Princess Half marathon!! #TureStory The word epic is being thrown around, and we hope you will be there to join us!

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?

Celebrating Disneyland Style Day 2

Can you believe it?? I finally wrote a recap of day 2, and it only took me a little over 2 weeks to do it!!
On day 2 we decided we were going to do the parks in the opposite order so we hit California Adventure a little after opening and headed straight back to Radiator Springs Racer!! It was closed the day before, and the fast pass return time was already up to 5:00pm so we were hoping the stand-by line wouldn’t be too bad.

It said 75 minutes, which for newer rides isn’t all that bad so we decided to brave the line. This was by far the longest line of the whole trip, but the kids did rather well. “The Boy” did want to be held a lot, but at least he wasn’t whiney about it.

We all rode it and there was a mixed reaction among us. My mom and I have ridden it before and both really like it, but this was the first time for the kids. #1 & #2 both loved it and wanted to ride it again, while #3 hated every minute of it and will never go on it again. The boy seemed to enjoy most of it, until the dips when we were race. Since he is a bit of a little guy those negative G’s were a bit much for him, but he didn’t complain! 

After the ride we stuck around Cars Land for a bit and rode the other rides they have to offer and enjoyed Radiator Springs in all it’s Christmas glory! They have a lot of trees there and they are all so unique. Here are a few of my favorites.


Up next the kids wanted to hit Bug’s Land so that is what we did. Amazingly “The Boy” insists that “the caterpillar” is his favorite ride, although I’m not sure I agree with him. We hit a few of the rides there and then it was on to my absolute favorite ride, Toy Story Mania!!


I am so bummed that TSM does not have fast passes at California Adventure, but thankfully the wait was only about 30 minutes, because this is a must do ride for me!

I had “The Boy” next to me and he had such a blast it made it that much better for me. Every time we moved to the next game he would do a fist pump and declare that he won that round! He was rather disappointed when we got to the end and he found out that I actually had the high score for the whole car!!

By now it was about 2 o’clock so we decided we better get some lunch. I’ll be honest here, I am not as impressed with the food choices at the Disneyland Resort as I am at Disney World, but I do like what I have tried at the Pacific Warf area of California Adventure. I was really hoping to try some of the clam chowder at Pacific Warf Cafe, but the line was really long the whole time we were there so that didn’t happen. Instead we ate at Cocina Cucamonga Mexican Grill, which is really good.

After lunch we headed over to the Animation Academy, as this is one of “Artsy Girl’s” favorite things at Hollywood Studios. Here we all tried our hands at drawing Agent P. I don’t think we did too bad. Can you guess who’s is who’s? I’ll give you a hint none of them are “The Boy’s” since he only scribbled all over his paper. ;)

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After playing around in Beast’s library, and getting our voices stolen by Ursula we decided it would be a good time to go to Disneyland and ride a few of the rides, like It’s a Small World, that we didn’t do on the first day. The girls also wanted to take another spin in the teacups. We spent most of the evening in Fantasyland riding my ‘classic’ favorites like Snow White and Pinocchio. When coming out of Pinocchio we spotted this guy! I <3 him!!



We were in line for Peter Pan when the boy decided he had to go to the bathroom. My mom took the girls and Peter Pan, while “The Boy” and I went to use the restroom an then rode on Dumbo . . . again. The Christmas Parade was going on at this time so the line was really short! We ended up waiting just about 10 minutes to get on the ride, and those of you out there with Dumbo lovers know how rare that is! 

After we rode everything there was in Fantasyland we decided we wanted to head back to California Adventure to end our evening with a hot cocoa from the Ghirardelli Chocolate Shop. Unfortunately, our timing was not as good as the day before and we got caught in the end of the parade mess. That always scares me, but alas we did make it out of the park safely and did not lose a single kid, so I call it a success.

We made our way over to Ghirardelli’s and was greeted by a CM handing out samples of peppermint bark. I had actually tried it before at the Ghirardelli Shop in Monetary last year and was surprised by how much I liked it since I am not a huge peppermint fan.

The 3 girls all got small hot cocoas, while I found myself intrigued by the salted caramel hot cocoa, and got a medium. We sat outside the shop for a bit enjoying the best hot cocoa we have had in a long time and then decided to make a loop around Paradise Pier while World Of Color was going on, before heading back to the car and home for the night.

I have to say it was a very nice ending to a wonderful trip. How can you not be happy when you get to see something like this on your way out of the park??