Livin' the Lard Life

This race was really alot of fun, but I learned alot for next year,

We flew into Orlando Friday morning. The first thing we did was go straight to the expo. I was really excited because we had already met a bunch of ladies who were in the race and they were excited too. The expo was very fun, not very many freebies (Compared to other races) but loads of "ladies running items". I bought the first memorabilia case I came to which was not smart, It was really big and expensive and if I would have walked around first I could have gotten a better deal, but, I was happy to get it. Not a ton of booths but this is only their 2nd year.

We stayed at the Pop Century Hotel, I have stayed at ALL the Disney Resorts with my family, but was trying to find out how in-expensive I could do this for so we stayed at the "budget hotel" which was fine,...but I will have to say, We had to get a taxi at 4:30 in the morning because NO TRANSPORTATION IN PROVIDED if you don't say at a "sponsoring hotel". you can tell this is still a new race because many of the hotel workers didn't know anything about how to get us there.Also the taxi had to drop us pretty far away and we had to walk into the event.
It was a very cold morning, I think 38 degress so the warm up walking into the race was good, only we had to wait outside freezing until we lined up for the race, I was expecting warmer weather and wore a tank, I'm from Oklahoma and had trained in cold weather but all the blogs said,"It warms up fast don't wear sleeves" so I didn't. Luckly some lady I met from Colorado felt sorry for me and gave me a trash bag to wear to warm me up. I had arm socks on, and that helped too. But I have to say at about the 3 mile marker, I was fine.But apparently others warmed up fast too. We saw so many sweat shirts,gloves, hats, ect...thrown to the side..."Mental note, go to salvation army before race and pick up a sweat shirt, All itmes picked up during race are donated. "

I had made tutu's for me and my friend to wear, you can buy them there but they were like 50.00 dollars and I made them for 3.00, so I figured if they got on our nerves we could just throw them away. We also ran the whole race in terrias, I was worried about this but honestly they were great, kinda worked like a head band and were very comfortable. Of course they are 10.00 at the expo. I talked to a few people during the race and it was so much fun to see all the funny costumes! Also next year I will remember to BRING A CAMERA on the run. This was a little odd to me, Dianna and I rounded the first corner to see Captin Jack and his ship and ran up to it to have our picture made (I thought Disney would surely have photographers) Only to have the Disney lady say "Where's your camera?" uhhh...I'm in a race, didn't think I would need to carry a purse. Anyway, they had TONS of photo opportunities, but we learned most you needed a camera for so we stopped stopping for pictures at that point.

Dianna almost ripped my garmin off my arm at mile 10, it is an up hill run and I was at that point thinking I could go under 2 hours so I picked up my pace, Dianna had a injury from the OKC 1/2 we did and said she needed to pull over so I like a great friend, I dumped her and picked up my pace, Of course Dianna is super fast and if I would have noticed her about a minute behind me I could have slowed down so we could finish together,....like I said, i'm not a good friend.

After the race was fun, We went straight to the massage tent because there was no line, only to find out...that costs money too. They had a ton of food and filled up a bog of it for us. We asked how we could get back to our hotel and they said go to transportaion center on monorail, so we did. But buses were not running yet because it was only 8:30 am. So we hunted down another taxi with some other ladies who were having the same issue and headed back.

Sunday's are always busy at Disney. So we decided to rest for the afternoon and hit the park hard that night. (I forgot that next year we will fly in the night before the race, we hit the parks hard Friday and Saturday and that made us pretty tired for the race.)

We loved this race and will take more of our Oklahoma Runnin Buddies next year!