I'm trying really hard not to second guess my decision to be honest with my estimated finish time for the marathon--I put myself in the second to last category, which is the best I'm aspiring to based on my current pace and fitness level. I'd like to do photos along the way and it'd be really cool to ride EE, but mostly I just want to finish the marathon...hoping I'll still have a good experience if I end up just ahead of the balloon ladies the whole way.
So I guess my answer to the question is...well, I'm not trying to avoid the last corral because frankly it's probably where I belong. I'm trying to look at it more in terms of how I can have a good time with a back of the pack start.
What constitutes a good experience in a first race is going to differ, but I think that determining a reasoned and honest answer to that question before the race will help determine if you indeed have a good experience. Set goals, certainly. But do not set goals far beyond your capacity to achieve them. I've heard many seasoned runners say your only goal before your first race at a new distance is finish. Before my first race, I decided to skip any and all photo opportunities that might present themselves during the race and contented myself with character photos
after the race with my hard earned finishers medal. Well, I passed up some once in a lifetime photo ops during that first race. 7
Disneyland races later and not a one of those unique photo ops I passed up the first time repeated themselves. But I finished. And thereby gained confidence and experience about just what I was capable of. And I learned from my own experience that I was sufficiently not slow to take some photos during the race if the lines were short enough.
I rode EE for my final time last year. This 45-year-old just can't handle those G-forces anymore. I can't imagine pulling that off in the middle of a marathon!!
This has certainly influenced me in my internal debates over Everest during the marathon. While I now think I just might be able to absorb the time it would take me to do that, I am concerned that my body might not respond well to such a decision. I'd still love to go on a ride during a race, but have accepted that I may never be able to do so. And I'm okay with that.
This is really reassuring, thank you. I'm trying to temper my expectations; I expect to need to pick and choose my character stops for time, and EE is a stretch goal I'm going to need to be prepared to abandon if conditions aren't prime for making it happen.
For my first marathon, I decided to set a stretch goal of one character photo during the race. I accomplished that easily enough, but since I knew exactly how the sweep worked, I knew that I could absorb more photo stops if I wanted to. For Marathon weekend, I strongly recommend getting on the DISBoards character group text thread that is set up beforehand. Basically a faster runner texts out all the photo stops and the approximate mile in the race where they take place. I had one runner ask if she could take a picture of my texts just so she could see who was available in the next few miles. In my case, it helped me know that if I really wanted a photo with Chip and Dale and Clarice, then I needed to plan accordingly and "bank" my photo stop time. This year it worked out even better. My second favorite animated movie is Beauty and the Beast. I've never gotten a race photo with Belle. Well the thread told me that Belle was at the France pavilion in Epcot shortly after mile 25. So I knew that if I wanted that photo, I should plan accordingly and possibly skip some longer waits because those characters didn't matter as much to me. Well, when I got to France I found that Belle and Aurora were alternating and my timing was so perfect that my turn actually came when both of them were. And if my avatar does not give it away, yes Sleeping Beauty is my favorite animated film.
But I thought, why would one want a medal knowing that they really didn't earn it?
I signed up for my first runDisney race because I really wanted the Disneyland Half Marathon medal. It had the classic Disneyland D with Sleeping Beauty Castle in the middle of it. At the time I viewed it as a unique souvenir of sorts that celebrated my Disney fandom and the only way to get it was to run 13.1 miles on race day. Well when the race started, fear and adrenaline kicked in and I started out way too fast in relation to the pace I had trained at. Less than half a mile into the race, I felt like I had shin splints. I honestly even considered quitting right then and there, heading back to my hotel room so I could do something sensible like go back to bed. Honestly, if you had told me right there that Disney would have given me the medal for just starting up, I fear I would have taken you up on that offer, collected that medal, and gone right back to bed. And I would have been content and happy that I had my cool looking Sleeping Beauty Castle medal from Disneyland and never taken up running again. At that time, the medal was a thing I wanted, not a prize to be earned only through hard work, sacrifice, and pushing myself when I did not want to push myself any further. While cheating to finish the race never crossed my mind, my motivation for doing it needed an adjustment if I was to enjoy this experience.
Fortunately, I still believed that I had to finish the race, so I decided to slow down to a pace that my body could tolerate. I would put one foot in front of another at this reduced speed and finish the race or they would remove me from the course because I was not good enough. Approximately 3 hours or so later, I would cross that finish line with never a glimpse of the balloon ladies who had started in the exact same corral as I did.
Some people want the medal as some sort of status thing. For my first race I wanted it as a cool keepsake. Honestly, I have only had one race since that very first race where I was so miserable that I wanted to quit. Thankfully I did not. And truthfully, both of my marathons were "less" difficult than that first half marathon in large part because I knew why I wanted to run those two marathons. And while the medals were cool and I truly love them, they represent so much more than just a cool keepsake.