The 2008 Disney Marathon was my first marathon and by far my most memorable. The event is at Walt Disney World, so the location is fantastic and the weekend is totally enjoyable, even if only because there is so much to do around the property. The fact that it’s hosted on Disney property also leads to a couple of drawbacks with the event itself, but I’ll get to that.
My wife, Jen, and I ran this marathon as fundraising participants with Team In Training. For those of you not familiar with the program, it’s the largest endurance sports program and run by The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. They recruit folks to complete an endurance event (marathon or half-marathon, triathlon, century bicycle ride) in exchange for raising money to fund the Society’s mission to cure blood cancers and improve the lives of patients and their families. Basically, they provide you with professional coaching, a team atmosphere, and transportation to and entry into the event for which you are training. This includes a carb-loading dinner prior to the event as well as a victory party after completing it.
Pre-Weekend
We stayed with our team in the Coronado Springs Disney Resort and if you’ve never stayed in a Disney resort, I highly recommend you do this if you’re planning to participate in an on-site sports event. Disney provides top-notch services, free transportation to any of the parks or attractions (including Downtown Disney) and you can basically park your car and never touch it again during your entire stay. In addition, they will cart anything you buy in their parks back to the hotel room for you so you don’t have to carry it around.
After checking in, we visited the Expo, which was top-notch. There were plenty of vendors and no shortage of things to do/buy. The only downside to buying commemorative items is that everything is Disney-licensed merchandise and so it’s expensive. Not terribly so, but certainly more than at most other Expos. The non-Disney items (typical marathon-specific clothing, sunglasses, etc.) were pretty much normal price for an Expo. While there, we picked up our bib and race packet, as well as our long-sleeve technical shirt, which was very nice.
After heading back to the resort to relax for a bit, we went to the Team In Training Pasta Party, which includes a guest speaker (many of TNT’s events feature John “The Penguin” Bingham as the keynote speaker, though he was not at this one)
and usually a blood-cancer survivor speaks to the group. This helps tie what each of the athletes have done in the way of both athletic training and fundraising back to the Society’s mission and can get very emotional. The food is always fantastic too!
Race Day
On Saturday night, we struggled to get to sleep at a decent hour but our anxiety made to hard to relax. We were in bed by 10:00 or so but tossed and turned until close to midnight. One of the few negative aspects of running the Disney Marathon is that they want you to get running and off their roads so that they can open them up to tourists. As a result, they expect you to be at the staging area by 3:30 so that you can move to the Start area around 5:30 for the 6:00 start. Notice there’s a two-hour gap between those times.
By the time you actually start the race, you’ve been awake since 2:30 and on your feet for about three hours. The staging area is a large parking lot and fortunately, it was 65° when we were there. Two years earlier, it had been just above freezing, so you can imagine what a toll sitting around in such temperatures must take on 15,000 runners.
We hung out as a Team in the staging area which made it a little more tolerable. Everyone who had things to do, such as body-marking, saved them until we were in the staging area, which gave us something to keep us occupied. My coach even asked me to write on the back of her legs — brave woman. For some reason, I wrote what she wanted instead of “Dave is Hot!” though to this day I’m not sure why. We all checked our post-race bags and made one last trip to the port-a-potties before heading to the Start area.
The start of the marathon is pretty spectacular with Disney characters animated on large jumbo screens to get you motivated and then some serious fireworks. If you’ve never seen 15,000 people start a marathon at the same time, it’s really impressive. You can’t tell from the picture to the right, but there are actually two sides of the highway (three lanes each direction) that are filled with runners and they go back quite a bit farther than the camera can see.
One of the immediate problems with a race this size is that walkers and runners are all lumped together. Jen ran the half-marathon the previous year and it took her 30 minutes to get from her starting corral to the Start Line where her chip time started. This is a common problem at Disney if you are in the last corral, so if you can supply a previous time to get into a better corral, I strongly recommend doing so. Even two or three miles into the race, the pack is still pretty much elbow-to-elbow, so any opportunity to get ahead of the walking crowd is beneficial.
As the race started, some idiot kept stopping at every mile marker to take a photograph. This isn’t too uncommon but he was taking it from the middle of the course instead of stepping off to the side. Every time he stopped, we all slammed into him (and subsequently one another) until eventually a few of us pushed him off the course. I don’t know if he finally “got it” or not, but he was behind us now so we never saw him again.
About two and a half miles into the course, you go through Epcot, which of course is closed. Instead of a normal PA system, Disney actually has a pretty significant sound system all throughout the parks (think about the quality of the music during the Light Parades) and there was house music blasting and bass pumping. Epcot’s World of Nations was all lit up with laser lights and strobes and there were characters on the course here and there. It was very energizing — perhaps more so than any other part of the Marathon course — to run through here at the beginning of the run.
Miles five through 10 are mostly on the highways between the Disney parks and therefore not all that exciting. This is to be expected given that you have to cover 26 miles and there’s only so much room that Disney can block off inside the parks themselves. As a side note, any part of the course that runs through a park is blocked off with a rope on each side to keep pedestrians out of your way. One of the things we appreciated most was that the mile markers are sponsored by Sharpie, and every tenth of a mile or so, there was a sign that had a random bit of trivia sponsored by Sharpie. The idea was to (a) cure some of the boredom of being in between parks and (b) foster conversation with other athletes. It was successful on both fronts.
Eventually you run through the Magic Kingdom, down Main Street and through Cinderella’s castle. This was one of my favorite parts because I actually knew the park. Since this was the first park that was open at the time we ran through, it was also our first chance to see spectators along the course. I can’t tell you what a big difference this makes! As we ran through the parking lots outside the Magic Kingdom, park visitors began to yell at us and people (park visitors and guests of runners) had gathered watch us go by. There were a lot of folks holding signs for Team In Training runners and many people just yelled at anyone whose name they could read on the bibs or your shirt. It was amazing how many people yelled “David” as I went by.
There are official photographers at some of the most desired photo opportunities, such as in front of Cinderella’s castle. Again, there are Disney characters along the way and you’re always welcome to stop and take a picture with them (you can use your camera or one of the official photographers will happily take a picture that you can purchase for $60 later) though there may be a line, especially for the more popular ones.
As we ran through the park, we also went behind parts of it and were able to see some of the “backstage” areas where shows were staging or characters were setting up. You will never see a costumed Disney character with their “head” off, but we did get to see Captain Jack Sparrow about to enter the park with some other (support) characters from Pirates of the Caribbean. After about a 10-minute run through the Magic Kingdom and another 15 or so minutes of running around it, we were back out on the highway between the parks where it was starting to rain.
It was a five-mile trip from the Magic Kingdom down to Disney’s Animal Kingdom and thankfully there were “Sharpie moments” to read along the way. There was also music set up every third of a mile or so and about the time you could no longer hear the last set of speakers, you could start to hear the next set that you were about to run past. Occasionally you would pass a live DJ on the course — there were probably three or four total along the way — or a live band.
It’s probably worth noting that I wore headphones during this race even though you’re not supposed to. I never saw anyone in the way of course officials challenging runners who were listening to music and I can’t believe that Disney would ever actually do this, but it’s also worth pointing out that there’s enough going on (both to hear and look at) that you can probably survive just fine without music, even if you’re used to wearing it when you run.
As we made our way into Disney’s Animal Kingdom, the drizzle stopped and it got very humid. It was obvious that a light rain in 74° weather had been a blessing in disguise, and it was about to get hot. At this point, the water stops also offered soaked sponges and more people were beginning to stop and make use of Bio-Freeze at the aid stations.
We actually ran in and out of Animal Kingdom a number of times so we saw a lot of their animal care facilities, staging areas and general “behind the scenes” stuff.. like their water treatment plant.
After running down another three miles or so of Disney’s highways to a turnaround point, we were at mile 21 and I had started to hit a wall. Actually, that’s probably putting it lightly — I was just plain miserable. It was bright and sunny and the temperature had soared to 80° on the course. It was humid and there was no breeze and I was totally uncomfortable. Worse, I had been dumping water over my head for the past hour or so and unbeknownst to me, drastically increased the weight of my singlet which worsened the chafing effect.
As we ran toward MGM Studios and Epcot, we were in the last five or so miles of the course. One of our coaches asked me if I wanted some sports jelly beans and I remember snapping at her that I didn’t want any. Our other coach, who was actually running with me, asked if I was OK and I vaguely remember snapping at her that I was fine. It was only after this moment that I began to replay in my mind how I sounded and realized that I must have hit the proverbial wall. And boy, did I!
Much of the next few miles were a struggle to run and I kept having to resort to walk breaks. I was exhausted and no matter what I did, once I started running again, I would quickly become too tired to continue and needed to walk again. It was humiliating and discouraging. More than anything, I felt bad for my coach who I could tell was suffering more each time she walked.
As we entered what I thought was the back of Epcot, I thought we just had to go halfway around the World of Nations (toward the front of Epcot, called Tomorrowland) and we would be finished. I didn’t realize that we actually came out on the very edge of the World of Nations and still had to run around the entire thing. Psychologically, it’s amazing what a difference this made and I remember feeling like it was the difference of having to go one more mile versus a dozen more miles. My coach kept telling me to stop looking at where everyone was running and just keep going, but it was no use — I was completely distraught that we had that extra quarter of a mile or so.
Worse, all of the cast members (Disney employees) were yelling at us that we were almost there and only had a quarter mile to go. In truth, we were only a little into the 25th mile and there was still roughly a mile to go. What happens is that we felt happy and relieved to hear that there was only a quarter mile to the Finish Line. Then a third of a mile or so down into the course, we began to feel confused, as we were certain we should have gone a quarter mile by now. Then another third of a mile into the course, we became angry and wanted to hurt the cast members. Let me take just a second to remind you that Disney World is the “most magical place on Earth” and it’s not easy to get angry with people who work there. Seriously, we were ready to kill them if they told us we only had a quarter mile left again.
There is a church choir positioned in the area of Epcot between the World of Nations and Tomorrowland singing gospel songs. At this point, you’ve hit a wall so hard that you’re willing to find religion if something will just carry your broken body to the Finish Line. As you see the choir and pray for the madness to end, that’s when you start to hear the activity at the Finish Line. As we ran into the front of Epcot, we could hear the announcer calling out names of participants as they ran across the Finish Line. I recognized the area from the previous year when I had watched Jen run in from her half-marathon.
My coach ran as far toward the Finish Line as she could go (once they go through, they can’t get back on the course, so they are very careful not to go into the Finish Line chute) and turned around to go back for other members of my team. I crossed the Finish Line and was quickly ushered through several stations between there and the post-race area. There’s a station where they take your chip (if you aren’t using your own) and another where they give you a Mylar blanket and your medal. Then they walk you into an area where they want you to get food and a sports drink before dumping you into the bag check tents where you claim your post-race bag (if you checked one). From there, you exit the Finish area into the Family Reunion Zone where family members can come look for you.
I went to the Team In Training tent and checked in so that they would know I made it out alive. I was the only person from my team who was in the post-race area and waited there for 30 minutes or so until another came through. My wife was not far behind and the three of us decided to wait for the last couple of members of our team that were still out on the course.
By the time everyone made it in and our coaches were off the course, we headed back to the resort. We had stayed on our feet this whole time because we knew that if we sat down, we wouldn’t be able to get up. We just wanted to get back to the resort, get into an ice bath, and then take a nap. We did not consider the fact that it was a 20-minute ride back to the resort on shuttles.. which means we had to sit. It was horrible trying to get back up out of our seats but knowing our beds awaited us served as significant motivation.
Overall, the Disney Marathon course was a good first-timer venue and the weekend was filled with fun. There are a few things about the course that I don’t particularly care for, primarily the early staging time and the amount of highways the course follows between the parks, but overall, the course is more positive than negative.
As for Team In Training, there were 1,900 fundraising participants that year and they managed to raise more than $5.6M to go toward finding a cure for blood cancers and funding patient programs. Including coaches, staff and alumni, all wearing the trademark purple clothing, we numbered close to 4,000. Much of the course was lined with spectators and probably a third of them were in some way there to support Team in Training. I probably heard between 500 and 600 people yell my name in encouragement as I ran by. I never did figure out how they could see my name printed on my race bib from so far away. Even more emotion-stirring, there were blood cancer survivors along the route holding signs that read things such as I am alive because of you. While I was unable to really process this while out on the race course, trying to later describe it to my mother over the phone from the resort left me reduced to tears. It was a truly life-changing experience.
