Race Review: Disney Wine & Dine Half Marathon (Part 1)

Tweet

To read about our 1st day at Disneyworld & the Expo go here.

On the morning of race day we did our best to sleep in. We had a reservation at Ohana at the Disney Polynesian Resort at 9:30AM. After wearing sandals the day before (Birkenstocks) and getting a blister which I've never gotten before with those shoes, I decided my new Run Disney shoes were the safest to walk around in pre-race (I needed to break them in anyway so I could wear them during the race!).

Breakfast was the typical breakfast food including Mickey-shaped waffles, all served family style at your table. The pastries and pineapple orange guava juice were delicious! I didn't want to eat TOO much because the race was, of course, later that same day. We hung around for a bit to get our token picture with Mickey and Stitch and watched the kids do their Hawaiian parade around the restaurant.

After our delicious and relaxing breakfast, we headed on over to Hollywood Studios to check out another park. I'd never been there before so I was pretty excited. We made our way to Tower of Terror immediately after entering the park and probably waited about a half hour which wasn't bad at all. For the rest of the day we walked around checking out the various rides/shows. Unfortunately we never made it on the Aerosmith Roller Coaster because the wait was 160 min and there were no more fast passes available. I still enjoyed this park a lot, possibly more than the magic kingdom. I loved the Great Movie Ride, it was about 15 minutes long and you literally tour through some of the greatest movies of all time, totally up my alley having gone to film school.

We only stuck around until just after 3:00, at which point the plan was to go to Downtown Disney and get something small to eat. When we got there, Downtown Disney was a lot busier than the parks had been. It was almost overwhelming, but we trudged on through the crowd, bought some souvenirs for family and went to Earl of Sandwich for something to eat. I had eaten there in Las Vegas and loved it. The line was about 20 minutes long but we waited anyway. We were both satisfied with the sandwiches (Caprese for me & Hawaiian BBQ for Cindy).

Finally, it was time to go back to the room and get ready for the race. It seemed silly getting ready at 5:30PM when the race wasn't until 10:00PM, but we had to be on the bus by 7.

Cindy was dressed as Rapunzel (Tangled) and I was supposed to be Minnie Mouse (minus the ears cause I just couldn't run like that). The shuttle picked us up at our hotel right around 7:00 (there was no line!) and it only took a few minutes to get to the ESPN zone. At that point, we had just under 3 hours to wait. We immediately headed to the bag check lineup which wasn't long at all. After that we noticed some extremely long lines and I realized that you could get pictures with some of the characters while waiting. We got in a line, not entirely clear who we were lining up for, but hey, we had time to kill! About 30 minutes later, we found the chipmunks! (We must have totally missed this at Tinkerbell)

Next, we just moved right on over to the next line to get another picture, this one was for Minnie so it took longer. Thankfully, they had an awesome DJ and a huge screen with pre-race entertainment including a surprise wedding engagement! That seems to happen at every Disney race! It all helped pass the time.

And then again we stood in line... In case you wondering, this is a general theme at Disney races, well actually, at Disneyworld/Disneyland period.

We also met lots of cool people while standing around. Runners are awesome that way, we can always find something to chat about!

Here is Darrell from Winnipeg, we saw him during the race too and nicknamed him "Winterpeg"... For all you non-Canadians, it's a lot colder there than here on the West Coast or in Florida for sure.

We also found another "Cindy"!

After all those lineups we headed to the bathroom lineup which didn't take very long. At this point they were calling everyone into the corrals. We had talked lots about the race in the days prior and of course while standing around. When we did the Tinkerbell Half Marathon back in January, we had pushed pretty hard in hopes that we might make the top 3 mother/daughter teams (we made top 6). This time around, we wanted to take advantage of everything a Disney race has to offer which, in our minds, not worrying about our time. I really shouldn't have brought my watch but I did anyway out of habit. The plan was to basically stop for every photo and run in between each stop.

Note: If you're going to buy the photo package with all of your photos from Marathonfoto, it is $65 whether you have 3 photos or 30 (this time we were going to get our money's worth). There is usually a cast member there to take your photo with your phone or personal camera but, in my experience, they are almost always blurry (likely on purpose) and the lighting sucks because it is dark (either early in the morning or at night).

So with all of those things in mind, we headed into corral E. I was originally supposed to be in D but Cindy was in E and we weren't going for time anyway. I love the lead-up to the Disney races, it really is a celebration! There were fireworks with every corral start and a huge champagne bottle on the side of the start line where they had a bubble machine to make it look like bubbles were coming out of the bottle. It might have been lame, but I was totally impressed!


Photo courtesy of Run Disney's FB Page

Photo courtesy of Run Disney's FB Page

As we edged to the start I had some of what I thought were hunger pains in my stomach... I didn't have much time to worry about it though because within about 8 minutes we were off in the sea of people headed towards Animal Kingdom.

You'll have to wait to hear about the rest in part 2 of my review!