May The Course Be With You

It's official folks! We have signed up for our first RunDisney race! We will be running the Star Wars 10k during the Star Wars Half Marathon - The Dark Side Weekend!

We knew we wanted to do a RunDisney race. I still have my sights set on a Princess 10k in 2018, but for now, we wanted to run together (or rather at least run the same race) so we decided to start with Star Wars weekend. The race will take place on April 22, 2017 so we have quite a while to train to run a full 6.2 miles. I used to not be able to run down the street so the fact that we purposely signed up to run more than 6 miles is hilarious to me. And you know what? We love it. That runner's high you hear about it totally real.

Last year's 10k medal. So excited to see this year's.

Registration was fairly painless. I heard so many horror stories about signing up that I admit to feeling extremely anxious the night before the passholder early registration date. As a matter of a fact, when the links actually went live and Steven said he was directed to the active.com site, my hands started shaking. I had this feeling that Steven would get in early and I wouldn't. That I would be trying my luck again on the real registration date. The 10k is definitely the most popular race length. Not so long that you feel crazy but long enough to get a real metal medal. Though I have heard now that they are instituting metal 5k medals this race season. As it turned out, I had nothing to fear. The registration was painless. We were able to get in right at noon and neither of us were put on hold. As of the end of the day, the only pre-registration sold out was the 10k but as long as we got in, I'm good. We could then move foward with training and not have to worry about any of the sign up process again.

Both of us elected to put our expected time as 12-13 min/mile. That works out to roughly 80 minutes to run the full course. My goal is basically to finish in under 90 minutes at this point. I hope to be way faster, but as long as I don't get picked up by the bus, I'm good. Plus, I know I will likely want to stop for a few pics along the way. Steven is less likely to stop... I think he is afraid of the bus...  but I am under the impression that Disney races are for fun and I am not looking to set any sort of PR. =)

We are certainly excited. The course will begin on Floridian Way towards Hollywood Studios where we will run down Hollywood Boulevard and then past the Yacht and Beach Club Resorts before heading to Epcot where the race will end. Somewhere in there. Last year it ended at ESPN Wide World of Sports so I'm not sure what this will look like but it should be fun.

We are super excited. So excited that I'm fairly certain I said that already. We will probably head down to the Expo on Friday to pick up everything and take a look around. I'm hoping it is less crowded that day so I can browse. I'm thinking I need something like this for race day. It is the Dark Side after all (the Light Side is at Disneyland). Someone start searching for this now. I am so putting in on my Christmas list. Along with a Minnie headband. It's happening.

As for actual training, we are both talking about upping our regular runs to around 3 miles and shooting for longer runs of about 4-5 miles every so often as we continue to build endurance. My goal is to eventually get to 4 miles on a regular day and "long" runs closer to 5.5 or 6. We will see how it goes.

We have a few months so serious training starts... NOW!