Disneyland Half Marathon!!!

Yesterday was our long awaited Disneyland Half Marathon and boy was it a trip! First, I can't believe it's over, I missed it as soon as I crossed the finish line! I'll definitely being doing another one or few of these. Disney puts on an AWESOME race weekend and they also have this Coast to Coast deal where if you run 2 of Disney's races - one at Disneyland & one at Disneyworld - in the same year you get a special medal. Yes, it's worth it! Onto the good stuff...
We left the in laws house Saturday morning and headed out to the expo, as I've mentioned before, I love expos... they are all the hype before the race and I love seeing all the great running gear and picking up the goodies. This race, we broke and got EFX wristbands. We look at them everytime and honestly, with all the sickness and non training we did we thought "Heck, what's it gonna hurt?!".

Us at the Photo-op provided outside the expo!

Kevin's Aunt Jen & Uncle Mike were wonderful enough to offer for us to stay at their house in Irvine so we were only 20 minutes away from Disneyland instead of about an hour. THANK YOU SO MUCH GUYS!!! So we settled our stuff in there and looked up the closest Olive Garden for none other than their Endless Pasta and Salad. It was Kevin's idea and I couldn't have thought of a better one! We basically stuffed our faces until we wanted to roll out. Ahhhhh, carb-loading!

***This is the crazy part*** We headed back to the house, relaxed, got all excited, got all of our pre-race junk done, set our alarm to 3:30 and headed to bed at like 7, 7:30..... Both of us wake up around 1:30 and fall back to sleep. THEN - Both of us wake up at 5:33 - O.M.G does not even begin to cover it! We jumped out of bed, brushed our teeth, threw our clothes on as we ran out the door and SPED OUR BUTTS to the race. The race started at 6 and we got there at about 10 til and had to run about 3/4 miles to the start line! Can you say warm up? We were in Corral C so we were set to start at about 6:15. On the way we realized why the alarm didn't go off - because Kev's normal alarm only goes off Monday to Friday and he simply modified the time on that one.... Whoops. Lucky for us, we made it just as the first wave set off.

Here we are, stoked that we made it and laughing at the whole experience!

I got so many great pictures of the race, I promise I tried to dwindle it down for you :)

We ran through the backlot and into California Adventures!

And into DISNEYLAND!!!

All the characters were out but I was still "a little" concerned about time so we only stopped at a few. I picked the wicked queen and saved the long line for the princesses until I run the Disney Princess Half!

For Noah!!

It was truly a unique and one of the most exciting experiences I've ever had.

Run, Babe, Run!!

Our classic mile 7 split. Note, we started about 40 minutes after the clock with the late group so that's not our time... I would be so ashamed! From here on we were on our own.

We ran out of Disney and through Anaheim, along the Santa Ana River trail and into the Angels stadium. So freaking cool!!!

~ Mile 11.5 I was hauling butt here and feeling a bit guilty for all the stopping for photo-ops. I'm so hard on myself, it's sort of ridiculous!

My honey coming to the FINISH LINE!!! Cramped thighs and all!

At the expo every runner was afforded the opportunity to sign this MASSIVE sign and we found ours on the way out.

R is for RUNNING YOUR TAIL OFF!!

Kevin finished in 2:38:57 and I finished in 2:21:40. Not half bad considering the whole slacker training, sickness and photo ops we took. We are both recovering MUCH better than the Hilo race which I attribute to the new wristbands -ha, who knows right?! and also that this is our 2nd halfie this year.

Where did we go after we got all cleaned up??? You guessed it - In N Out!! YUM!

Thank you to everyone for your bombardment of support and enthusiasm!!! It was greatly appreciated!