In my very eloquent words on Facebook, "Guys guys I did the thing!"
By "the thing," I meant the Disney Princess Half Marathon, which took place on February 26th. It was so much fun. I absolutely loved it and I want to do it again next year. Here's how the day went down:
2:00 am: Alarm went off and I got up. I am so lucky that my roommate Kayla was also doing the race, so we had each other to make sure we were both awake, and her boyfriend Andrew drove us to Epcot.
3:30ish am: We got to Epcot and parked. There was a surprising amount of activity going on and an incredible amount of energy for that early in the morning. They had a place to check your bags, a concession stand, a stage with a DJ (I have a lot of respect for him, because he had so much energy for so early), and two character meet-and-greet locations. We hung out for a bit, then got in line to meet Merida/Pocahontas (they were switching princesses in between sets). We got to meet Pocahontas, who's Kayla's favorite. So that was a good start to the day.
4:30 am: They announced that the corrals were open, so Kayla and I said goodbye to Andrew and started making our way toward them. It was a ~15 minute walk to get over there.
5:15 am: I was in a different corral than Kayla, so I stayed with her until 5:15 and then went to my corral. Where I waited with the people around me for the race to start at 5:30, and then for our corral to finally take off around 6:30.
6:30-9:30 am: I ran the race! I stopped to meet a bunch of characters, and my final time was somewhere around 3:11. We started right by the Epcot parking lot, ran to Magic Kingdom (including going down Main Street and running through the castle), and then went back to Epcot to finish. Along the way, there were characters and DJs, so there wasn't too much opportunity to be bored or to focus on how much farther there was to run. There were also so. many. people. Just overall, so many runners. I loved seeing some of the costumes that people wore. As you can see in my photos, I Disney-bounded as Ariel, with my mermaid tank top and blue-green leggings. I even had a dinglehopper in my hair, though I forgot to take any pictures of it.
Ahead: all of the Photo Pass photos that were taken during the race. I also took a bunch of selfies throughout the race, but I'm having trouble getting them up right now.
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| Running down Main Street |
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| Running through Tomorrowland |
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| I asked her what a good pose would be for the two of us :) |
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Me meeting Gaston: "Gaston, could we do a flexing pose?"
Gaston: "No! Well, I can flex but you can't"
Me: "I can totally flex too!" (that's what my face is saying in this photo)
So I proceeded to flex... |
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| ...and Gaston covered my baby bicep. |
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| Running through Frontierland |
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| Coming through the castle! |
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| Got to meet Tourist Genie |
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| And Mushu! |
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| Running through Epcot |
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| Happy Katie :D |
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| I did it! |
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| And I look much happier than the woman behind me... |
After the race, we went back to the apartment to get showered and changed. I went to meet my friend Maggie for lunch and then we hung out at her apartment for a while. Somehow, and I'm still not sure how, I had the energy to go to Magic Kingdom after the race. I really wanted to get some photos with my favorite princesses on the day that I ran the Disney Princess Half. So I went solely for photos.
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| Meeting Tiana. She told me she was really good at hopping because she had once been a frog. So I told her I wasn't so good at hopping, but I did have to weave between people during the race. |
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| I love Rapunzel <3 |
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| I also had to meet Tink, even though she's not a princess. |
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| I asked her for a sassy pose ;) And then looked at the wrong camera |
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| I had to meet my childhood favorite |
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| Classic castle photo |
I had over 40,000 steps that day, and I was so tired at the end. But it was also so so much fun. Fingers crossed I'm still around next February and I get to do it again.
Bye for now!
