January 4, 2018 – Part One

If you’ve ever competed in a runDisney event, you know that your alarm goes off way too early! We got up and got ready – I was still in pain from the night before (stupid me missing a step on the stairs, such a *facepalm*).

We caught the bus and arrived at the starting place of the race (in a parking lot by Epcot). We made our way through security and headed towards our corral. I think I was in a higher corral than Luke, but you are allowed to move back (you just can’t move forward to a higher corral) so I dropped back to his. We took a selfie while we waited.

I was hurting, and knew I wouldn’t be able to go much faster than a walk – even that was painful with each step. Luke assured me to not worry about it, to not hurt myself even more by pushing too hard and we’d figure it out. Eventually our corral had the countdown, and we were off! The first characters we came upon were Chip and Dale – I needed the break so we hopped in line. I handed over my phone to get a photo with that, but also scanned my Magicband to get the photos taken by Photopass – what a difference! The cast members using your phone don’t zoom or anything – it’s not difficult to tell which photo is which –

Our costumes were Luke’s idea – he wanted to be Ursula haha. They also looked much better when we tried them at home, we weren’t expecting it to be so cold! I had on a tight tank top as a base layer, then a hoody, then an athletic tshirt on top of my hoody (the black Nike one you can see), then my Ariel top (which is absolutely a bathing suit top haha) then my jacket. My plan was also to wear plain black capri-length yoga pants with the Ariel bathing suit bottoms on top of those so you could see them better, but I needed the full length pants (luckily I had packed a few extra pairs, and these ones kind of worked with our costume theme). Luke’s purple face paint was actually some anti-redness makeup stuff layered on thick – much easier on the skin than Halloween paint haha.

We kept going, and Photopass captured these – you can see the pain on my face in a few of these pictures….

I love the rare characters that are out during the runDisney events – we didn’t stop for all of the characters this day, but we did get to meet Jiminy Cricket, vacation Genie and Horace Horsecollar (in addition to Chip & Dale), as well as some Vikings in Norway. Here are the photos taken with my phone –

And here are the Photopass pictures taken by the professionals –


Here are a few more Photopass pictures (we definitely got our money’s worth during this race!)

It was so cold, I was wearing Luke’s mittens which were way too big for me haha.

Eventually, we made our way across the finish line (we did not make good time haha) – and received our medals and snack boxes. We stopped for one final Photopass photo before heading back to the buses to take us back to OKW.

By the time we got back to OKW, I was so sore and we were both exhausted so we decided to cancel the fastpasses we had made for Magic Kingdom, and instead had hot showers and a much-needed nap.