This year my husband, children, and father joined my mother and me for the 2017 WDW Marathon Weekend 5K race. We woke up at 4:00 and I got the kids up around 4:20. They weren’t too keen about waking up that early, but the race start was 6:00 a.m. and I wanted to be on the road by 5:30. Everyone ate a little something to hold them over until the race was over and we were in the car by 5:30. I was running all of my races in honor of our friend Lyla.
Pre-Race Events
We took some pictures before the race and then the kids had the experience of witnessing hundreds of porta potties lined up in the runners’ area. It was funny to see their reaction to that. My mom and I were also dancing with the DJ playing, but my daughter thought it was silly of us to do that! I hope that age isn’t coming where the kids are becoming too cool for their parents!
The Race Start
When you register for the races, you have to submit a proof of time or an estimate of your pace. Based on that, you are placed in the appropriate corral. We had a variety of corral locations on our bibs, so in order to stay together, we had to go to the lowest corral. For us, that was corral F.
As the corrals were being released each corral was released in a wave. So the kids were separate from us and we had to pull them back to our section. This is something new I hadn’t seen in past races. We finally started at 6:48 a.m. We walked the race and my daughter was a bit of a grump until we got into Epcot. It was a very cold morning and her feet were cold so she was struggling a little bit. But that changed once we got into Epcot!
Characters On Course
My son and husband were a little bit ahead of us. My son wanted to jog a little bit. We stopped for the first character stop with Thumper and Blossom. Then once we got into Epcot we stopped for a picture with the Vikings. As you can see, my mother wasn’t ready for that picture! Once we were in Epcot Adrienne cheered up and seemed to enjoy more of the race.
As we continued through Epcot, which is so beautiful that time of day with the sun rising, we skipped past the other character stops. The characters in the countries were Minnie Mouse in Italy and chip and Dale in Morocco. But we could NOT skip the Donald Duck stop in Canada.
As we were in line we were warned that if we remained in line, the sag wagon was coming and we were at risk of not finishing. My parents were nervous about that, but I told them we’d be ok and we could out-walk them. Just near the fountain was Space Goofy, but we didn’t stop for him.
The highlight of the race for me was spotting Mike Green on the course. I had written a blog post about him the week before the race. I had a chance to introduce myself to him before I had to catch back up with my family. I was so glad to see a member of Team Cigna out on the race course. We finished at 1 hour and 15 minutes.
Will We Do It Again?
Despite the early wake-up and some of the groaning my daughter did early on in the race (which I completely expected in advance), it was a good time and both kids want to do it again!
Have you done any of the runDisney Races with your family? Did you know you don’t have to run the entire distance? The 5K is a family-friendly race that everyone can participate in!