If you’ve done a RunDisney event, your first question here may be “Kelly, if you’re going to do Goofy, why not run the extra 9.3 miles and just do the Dopey challenge?!”
Simple: Vacation time.
In May while celebrating Emily’s birthday, I convinced mike to come into the city to meet us at barcade…. and then proceeded to talk him into running a marathon
Don’t you love grown up jobs?
Anyway, I did manage to rope two of my friends into traveling to Florida with me - Mike and Jennie. While you have heard of Jennie before (she ran in the Star Wars Dark Side Half Marathon weekend with me in 2018), Mike is new to the blog, and while we have known each other since the third grade (about 20 years now), he is the most recent victim of, as Dad calls it, my run-bullying.
Back in 2016 when I was a new runner, Mike was the friend that agreed to sign up for my first New York Road Runners race with me. Since then, we have done a few races together every year, and one drunken day in NYC later, I had talked Mike into the 9+1 program that the NYRR offers - with the ultimate goal of running the NYC marathon in 2019. So the disney half is a step on his path to the NYC marathon, and will be both his first half-marathon and his first RunDisney event.
Jennie will be along for the ride this time, hitting up the Disney parks with us and acing as the captain of our cheer squad. Don’t worry guys, I will make sure that she gets a full lesson in acting as captain from both Dad and Emily.
Anyway, Mike started training using the plan that RunDisney offers on their website, and after taking a solid week off of running post wineglass marathon, I began to roll right from one training cycle into another. I am starting to get my mileage back, and once the wedding is over at the end of October, I will be able to shift my focus fully to training for these races.
The best part about this training cycle so far? Fall weather. Here in NY, we seem to have finally broken through the humidity barrier, and settled into cooler temps nicely - Here’s hoping that this training cycle goes a little more “according to the plan.”