This One Time...: Thirteen Point Freaking One!

On January 7, my brother and I ran our first half marathons! And what better place to torture yourself for 13.1 miles than the happiest place on earth - Disney World!

I would easily put this 13.1 mile run down as one of my top five life accomplishments. So why am I just now blogging about it? Well, because it took over a month and a half for my parents to figure out how to download the photos off my mom's digital camera and get them to me. Welcome to life as a LaSelva kid.

I've heard that for your first race you shouldn't set goals, but with my and my type A personality, that just wasn't an option:

Goal #1: Don't die!

Goal #2: Don't get picked up by Mickey Mouse and his golf cart - when I signed up for the race I read through all of the fine print of the waivers and agreements and noticed that runners had 3.5 hours to complete the race. Any runner unable to keep a pace resulting in a 3.5 hour finish or more, would be picked up by a golf cart and driven to the finish line - it doesn't get much worse than that folks! How humiliating! I swear I spent the last few months of training having nightmares about Mickey Mouse and his friends chasing me through the Magic Kingdom with me yelling over my shoulder, "please just let me finish!"

Goal #3: Finish in less than 3 hours

After months of training, race weekend finally arrived and I was pumped! Because the race started so early, and because having our entire family in the same room is somewhat monumental now days, my parents decided to make a mini vacation out of it.

We arrived in Orlando the day before the race and immediately went to the race check-in and fitness expo. As we walked past lines of cars with stickers from not just half marathons, but full marathons, triathlons and iron man competitions, I started to panic. Here I am having never run in my life before six months ago and now I'm standing here getting ready to run a half marathon. I felt so intimidated, like everyone was looking at me knowing I had no business competing in their race.

The next morning the alarm went off at 3:30am. Even though we were staying at a Disney hotel, we still had to be on the bus at 4:00am in order to get to our spots at the starting line by 5:00am. The fact that I'm not a morning person coupled with the fact that any excitement had turned to absolute panic, kept me almost silent all morning.

My parents might have been more nervous than me, and rightfully so. Just a few years before they were sitting in doctor's offices looking for answers as to why their daughter's lungs weren't functioning normally (more here) and now here we were, me getting ready to run a half marathon and them never having seen my months of training and progress.

Also, even though it's Florida, it was still basically the middle of the night in January and we were freezing. My brother and I kept our jackets as long as we could until we had to hand them off to our parents in order to line up with the other 27,000 runners - yes, I said 27,000 race participants!

Around 5:30am Josh and I made our way toward the starting line. We were in different waves so we parted ways about 30 minutes after saying goodbye to the parental unit. Our other brother J.J. decided to just stay asleep in the hotel and Sam spent the night in his apartment (he goes to college in Orlando) and meet us after the race was over.

My wave didn't start until around 6:30am so I was standing in the cold for quite some time before I was even able to start. In fact, when I was finishing mile #1, there were people from the first wave already passing us on their way back, which was mile #11 for them. Talk about discouraging!

As soon as I crossed the starting line, I turned on Needtobreathe's new album and just focused on getting into a good rhythm and decent pace. Thankfully, unlike my Turkey Trot experience, there was plenty of room and it was easy to get around people.

By the time I hit the 0.5 mile mark, I was feeling confident and was grinning from ear to ear. For at least the first 8 miles, I couldn't wipe that goofy grin from my face even if you paid me a million dollars.

Plus, my parents who couldn't seem to figure out how to download photos, somehow mastered Disney's runner tracking system so they could see me and my brother (who was about an hour ahead of me) at different points in the race.

Having my parents there made the whole event so special. Living so far away from them is hard because we rarely get to share even the big moments like Thanksgiving or seeing my new house, so being able to share this achievement with them was incredibly special.

I could not have picked a better race for my first half marathon! When you see people at every mile stopping to take pictures with characters, it's hard to psych yourself out or feel intimidated. Everyone (at least in my wave) was so encouraging, kind and relaxed. It's easy to forget about the pain when you are running right through the castle at the Magic Kingdom and just when you start to feel discouraged, you look up and see the sun rise right over the ball at Epcot. In fact, I was so entertained/distracted by the characters, bands, and sights and sounds of the parks, that my music had stopped playing for at least a mile before I even realized it.

Running at sea level compared to the Rocky Mountains of Colorado where I had done all of my training was awesome! I never once had trouble catching my breathe. However, despite the elevation, your body (or at least my body) does start to break down at a certain point. My smile started to slip away right at the 10 mile marker.

About 2/3 of the race is on major roadways and right after I reached mile 10, the course led us straight up a freeway embankment. This is what I know - I drive a 6 cylinder SUV and even it would have had to switch gears in order to make it up this thing. I was already pretty tired and in the final three mile stretch so I shouldn't have been surprised when my body pushed back and my knee gave out. I didn't fall or anything, but I sure could feel the pain shooting down my leg with every step. At that moment I knew my nice pace was totally blown and by mile 11 I was starting to have doubts I would even finish. This was no longer fun, but I was determined to finish and I was determined to cross the finish line after running (not walking) the last mile.

I am happy to say, tweaked knee and all, I made it AND met all three of my goals!

Final Time: 2 hours and 50 minutes (I was hoping to be closer to 2:30 than 3 hours, but for my first half marathon I am thrilled to death to meet my original goal of 3 hours with some time to spare!)