Princess Half Marathon Weekend

Last weekend, I ran the Princess Fairy Tale Challenge at Disney World in Orlando, FL with my girlfriends.  It would be a good trip with my girlfriends just before my husband had to go back to the hospital for another brain surgery to deal with the leftover benign tumor.

The Fairy Tale Challenge consists of a 10K on Saturday and a Half Marathon on Sunday, and my girlfriends and I also signed up for the 5K on Friday.

We arrived in Orlando on Thursday afternoon and immediately went to the expo to get our stuff for the race, buy some stuff, before heading to Epcot to have a couple of drinks around the world.



We tried to head to bed early, but of course we were unsuccessful.  We barely made it two hours of sleep each night and it showed, ha.

Princess 5K
We woke up between 2am and 3am to head to the buses no later than 3:30am.  We headed to the athlete's village and were pretty much in front of the corral, which was good, since the character stops for this race took forever.  The 5K is untimed so it leaves people more time to stop for pictures.  We finished the 5K in 1:50 or something like that.  But we had so much fun!




After the 5K and brunch with our friend, Beth, we headed to Animal Kingdom to have some more fun:


Princess 10K
We had maybe 30 minutes of extra sleep for Saturday, which made us look more human for the 10K.  We also took the bus at around 3:30am and were there early enough to use the potties and line up in the corral.  Our plan today was to get as many character spots until we see the balloon ladies (the ladies that start at the end and do 16mm and if you are passed by them you risk being picked up and not allowed to finish). The stops were taking a long time but not as bad as with the 5K.  We saw the balloon ladies and were passed by them (briefly) at Mile 5 after a Goofy character stop.





We finished at somewhere around 2:17 or thereabouts. But faster than the 5K, for sure.  We were hoping the character stops for the half marathon were not as long.

After the race, we had lunch with our friend Sabine at the Raglan Road Pub in Disney Springs:


And also got our 25th Anniversary Disney Marathon hats embroidered:


Spent most of the day in Disney Springs before heading to Epcot for our dinner in Italy.  Between the monorail and the dinner, we managed to sleep another 2 hours before the half marathon.

Princess Half Marathon
Sunday was lots of fun as well.  We were able to stop on as many character stops that we wanted to and made it in good time, breaking sub-4 hours:






Overall, one of the best race weekends I've had.  We need to repeat!

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