This year I decided to change up my traditional Thanksgiving morning race and sign up for the Manchester Road Race. I sent Kimberly Torres a text to see if she was running it and when she said yes, I signed up right away! Danielle Nardi also decided to sign up that same night so we are having a runDisney reunion outside of Disney. I am really looking forward to it! What I am loving most is the fact that with almost any race, I can put a message out on facebook and can find friends from runDisney to join for these races. What an awesome community the running and runDisney community is. Everyone is so friendly and always enjoys trying to hook up for races. My friend from work Michael Bower will also be there. I was hoping to hook up with Diana who I will be hooking up with for the Walt Disney World with Mandy Remmo also. With 15,000 people it was very hard to find anyone. I did see Michael. He was in the seeded runner section so I was able to find him easier.

I got up at 6 am to get dressed, eat some oatmeal and tea and headed over to Beth’s house to pick up Danielle. Then we drove up to Kensington to pick up Kim. Off to Manchester and we arrived at 8:00 and got a great parking space. We waited in the gym so we could stay warm as long as possible. Kim took advantage of the free massage they had.

The race takes place in Manchester, CT at 10:00 am. It is a 4.748 mile run with 15,000 runners! It began in 1927 with just 12 runners. Today with so many runners and the events at the Boston marathon, there was a lot more security. There were armed personnel on the roof of one of the buildings on Main Street.

Kim, Danielle and I are on a mission to run it and get it done so we can all carry on with our Thanksgiving festivities. So I was hoping to have a decent finish time. We finished in 55 minutes. The crowd never really broke loose so we had a slower pace the entire race.

This was a fun race and I am pretty sure I will do this one again. I hope we can get another group put together again next year.