My alarm wen toff at 2:47 AM. It was too early. And too cold.
But today was the first of four races for the Dopey Challenge. Today was Pluto’s 5K.
runDisney had warned us at the expo that it was a yellow flag weather condition… and they went so far as to put up a weather advisory on their website:
Yet even knowing all of that, and even layering up from bottom of my toes to the tip of my… ears, I was still pretty dang cold.
My brother and I recently laughed scrolling through our respective phones’ camera rolls and noticed we had a plethora of parking lot numbers. He and I both snap a shot of the pylon or marking to remember where we parked… and we apparently never delete those. I suppose if a detective shows up at my door needing to know where I was at a particular time on a particular date, depending on the day in question I might be able to give him the exact section of parking lot. That’s all roundabout preamble to say this morning I was in Create 43.
In the early, pre-dawn hours before the race start, I grabbed a couple of photos with our Disney friends. The lines got progressively, exponentially longer as the clock ticked along.
The corrals opened around 4:30 AM… which meant just, ya know, an hour of standing around waiting for the first wave to go off (I was fortunate enough to be in that first corral… those who were farther down the alphabet had an even longer stand-around wait time).
I don’t know if it was the Oswald the Lucky Rabbit ears or the freezing temperatures that froze the fat molecules in a smushed position, or the excess weight I just can’t seem to shed, but, man do I look bloated and huge in these photos. I ran into Nick Tarvin, a fellow Team Pizza Racer and perfect Dopey-ian who I usually see once a year here at WDW for these races. Nick’s clearly been putting in some serious training as he’s super fast, faster than me, more like a cheetah to my sloth.
As for the race itself, not a lot of photo stops. Yes, it was “only” a 5K but I still feel like in years past there have been more than two character stops (three if you count the Vikings in Norway). There seemed to be a lot more Disney PhotoPass pros shooting “action” shots on the course so if you were willing to pony up the extra Disney Dollars for that feature maybe you’d get some good shots that way. But I was marginally disappointed to only see Chip and Dale and Jiminy Cricket cheering us on.
The usual suspects, the fab four plus Dopey, were back out at the finish line for medal shots. Again, as I was fortunate enough to be in the opening corral I had minimal wait times to grab a shot or two with each of them. I even got to compare ears with Goofy… and high-three Pluto (I mistakenly said we could high-four, not realizing his paw was three-fingers).
The frost that covered the leaning tables hadn’t melted… and though I was awfully tempted to grab a chilled champagne (which I suppose would just be room temperature in this arctic cyclone) cooler heads prevailed. Literally cooler heads… I was a Kev-sicle and needed to get home to thaw out. I did stop and say hello to my TravellingFit friends who are here with their Aussie clients.
Mom felt bad that she couldn’t join me at the races. Her knee is bothering her something fierce and I didn’t want her standing outside in this cold either. But she was waiting for me when I got back and thus we took our own medal shot in the kitchen.
And on top of that, she’s making my belt for tomorrow’s running costume. This way when I see Mickey tomorrow I can show it to him and tell him my Mommy made it for me.
One race down. Three to go for this year’s Dopey Challenge. The forecast for tomorrow? More of the same… albeit twice as long running (it’s a 10K after all).