Pre-Trip George and Scott plan a family-free ToT Ten Miler trip

I guess you could say that the beginnings of this thread started in another Trip Report. Mine actually. In November of last year I took a trip to run in my first runDisney race, the Wine and Dine 1/2 Marathon. I finished the race, had a good time, got home, wrote up my trip report. Next thing I know, I get a message in my WDWMagic Inbox from @George

Scott,
I read the beginning of your trip report and it gave me an idea. Since my kids are school age, the Disney races aren't at good times, would you consider doing a half marathon or Tower of Terror Ten Miler with me? We could pick the exact dates and times later, since there are 4 or 5 options.
Thoughts?
- - George

With this, the seeds of a trip were planted.

We've had a few brief conversations via phone and PM to set some of the basics. We decided upon the Tower of Terror Ten Miler race, in October 2014, mostly because we're excited for the afterparty at DHS. We've registered for the race.

We've also somehow gotten the blessings of our spouses that this trip will be "solo". Just two gentlemen heading down for some wholesome fun, to run a 10 mile race through the WDW Property, to ride some rides, enjoy some of the fine food options, and have a good time enjoying the parks without kids slowing us down there to join us in the fun. I've even got my wife to let me put off telling my kids until just about a week before I leave for the race, so I don't have to spend the next 8 months with my children openly hating me.

What I thought would be fun though is if @George and I would make the plans for our trip out here in the trip report forum under a Pre-Trip heading. That way we can solicit the opinions of anyone who would be so inclined to read this little thread, and we can utilize the vast knowledge of our fellow WDWMagic fans to prepare a great short vacation.

So, to start off @George I think we firm up the dates. I'm thinking we fly down on Thursday, 10/2 and return on Monday 10/6. That'd give us a couple days in which we're not being asked to run ungodly distances where we can enjoy the parks. A day or two prior to the race, and a day or two limping around after the race.

I think the flight schedules open up soonish, so if you'd like to fly out of your local airport and meet me down there, or if you'd like to pop up to my place and stay on Wednesday night and we fly together out of Midway, that would work as well. If we did that, it would give me the added benefit of staging a faux kidnapping in front of my kids so that I can claim plausible deniability in knowingly leaving them to go to WDW.

 

[sshindel]

My last planned training run before the race this morning, and I slept right through it. Oh well. Maybe I'll do it tomorrow morning, maybe I wont. I don't think it'll change a single thing about the race on Saturday.

Jeez, I only have 2 days left! 2 more entries! What am I looking forward to today?

Hmm.. I already touched on Kona Cafe, where our late Breakfast now has at least 14 people attending. I've already talked more about Epcot than I should, even for me, so I wont touch wanting to try Sum of all Thrills for the first time. I've hit the Tower of Terror race, which I just printed and signed my race waiver for. I hit Universal. I hit a few other abstract topics. Today, I'll hit something simple.

Wilderness Lodge

I've only been in this resort 1 time, and it was walking through it to get from a bus to a boat, with a potty break on the way. Just that one time though really struck me. I love that style. I'm a Ft. Wilderness aficionado, so I already have that kind of woodsy thing deep down. I've loved some of the fishing trips I've made deep into Canada. I thought Alaska was the most amazing place. So, the theme here strikes me in a very sweet spot.

Staying in a DVC room for the first time, at a resort I've always wanted to stay in, I'm thrilled about that. I kind of wish that the whole resort was going to be up and running, but the main pool is going to be down for refurb, which will take away from it a little. Still, there are other pools, and I have no idea how much I'll use the pool in the first place.

I think I'm going to really love Wilderness Lodge. And I'll be checking in there in 2 days!

 

[abeachchick]

My last planned training run before the race this morning, and I slept right through it. Oh well. Maybe I'll do it tomorrow morning, maybe I wont. I don't think it'll change a single thing about the race on Saturday.

Jeez, I only have 2 days left! 2 more entries! What am I looking forward to today?

Hmm.. I already touched on Kona Cafe, where our late Breakfast now has at least 14 people attending. I've already talked more about Epcot than I should, even for me, so I wont touch wanting to try Sum of all Thrills for the first time. I've hit the Tower of Terror race, which I just printed and signed my race waiver for. I hit Universal. I hit a few other abstract topics. Today, I'll hit something simple.

Wilderness Lodge

I've only been in this resort 1 time, and it was walking through it to get from a bus to a boat, with a potty break on the way. Just that one time though really struck me. I love that style. I'm a Ft. Wilderness aficionado, so I already have that kind of woodsy thing deep down. I've loved some of the fishing trips I've made deep into Canada. I thought Alaska was the most amazing place. So, the theme here strikes me in a very sweet spot.

Staying in a DVC room for the first time, at a resort I've always wanted to stay in, I'm thrilled about that. I kind of wish that the whole resort was going to be up and running, but the main pool is going to be down for refurb, which will take away from it a little. Still, there are other pools, and I have no idea how much I'll use the pool in the first place.

I think I'm going to really love Wilderness Lodge. And I'll be checking in there in 2 days!

Also looking forward to trying Sum of All Thrills for the first time

 

[sshindel]

Last entry!

What am I looking forward to today?

JUST BEING THERE ALREADY!!!

Sorry, not more profound than that. I'm just biding my time through the end of the work day. Once I get home, I'll be busy with the kids, and helping get the house in shape so my wife doesn't have to do a ton while she's alone with the kids. That time will fly. Then it's trying to fall asleep, and I'm on my way!

 

[Tiggerish]

What's the over/under on how many times you say "I'm too excited to sleep"?

 

[xdan0920]

My last planned training run before the race this morning, and I slept right through it. Oh well. Maybe I'll do it tomorrow morning, maybe I wont. I don't think it'll change a single thing about the race on Saturday.

Jeez, I only have 2 days left! 2 more entries! What am I looking forward to today?

Hmm.. I already touched on Kona Cafe, where our late Breakfast now has at least 14 people attending. I've already talked more about Epcot than I should, even for me, so I wont touch wanting to try Sum of all Thrills for the first time. I've hit the Tower of Terror race, which I just printed and signed my race waiver for. I hit Universal. I hit a few other abstract topics. Today, I'll hit something simple.

Wilderness Lodge

I've only been in this resort 1 time, and it was walking through it to get from a bus to a boat, with a potty break on the way. Just that one time though really struck me. I love that style. I'm a Ft. Wilderness aficionado, so I already have that kind of woodsy thing deep down. I've loved some of the fishing trips I've made deep into Canada. I thought Alaska was the most amazing place. So, the theme here strikes me in a very sweet spot.

Staying in a DVC room for the first time, at a resort I've always wanted to stay in, I'm thrilled about that. I kind of wish that the whole resort was going to be up and running, but the main pool is going to be down for refurb, which will take away from it a little. Still, there are other pools, and I have no idea how much I'll use the pool in the first place.

I think I'm going to really love Wilderness Lodge. And I'll be checking in there in 2 days!

You guys got a king bed room, right?

 

[Bob]

You guys got a king bed room, right?

They got one with one of those rotating circular beds.

 

[sshindel]

You guys got a king bed room, right?

They got one with one of those rotating circular beds.

 

[xdan0920]

I love her.

 

[George]

In the steel bird now, flying to O town.

 

[Nemo14]

Can't wait to meet you guys! Good luck with the race (there is a race, right? )

 

[xdan0920]

In the steel bird now, flying to O town.

Are we supposed to be happy for you?

 

[Nemo14]

Are we supposed to be happy for you?

Who wouldn't be? He's going to meet me!

 

[Nemo14]

Just got back to Bradenton, but I wanted to say it was really neat getting together with all of you today. DH still thinks I'm nuts talking to strangers on the internet, but he agreed that you are all a great group!

 

[sshindel]

I think that today I'll finally get a chance to start doing a little post-trip wrap up in this thread. Honestly, I've spent most of the week trying to nail down the details of my next trip! Only a couple more months until that family fest!

I didn't take a ton of pictures, and really no group shots (others have those though ), so you'll probably not get a full fledged moment by moment trip report here, maybe a smattering of thoughts and pictures I took for Instagram.
I'll go into detail a little about the race because I know there are some folks interested in how that was. I'll get started on posting my post-trip thoughts soon.

 

[sshindel]

Seems like a good day to talk a little about the race, since it was just announced (or left off an announcement) that the Tower of Terror 10-miler has been left off of the schedule for next year.

@George and I picked up our packets on Friday afternoon, after a day at Universal. We drove over to the ESPN Wide World of Sports directly from USF. Packet pickup went easily enough. My wife was asking me to stop and find one of the speakers because she was a blogger that my wife follows (Disney Bound I think?!?), but I could not find the speaker there even though we were in the building when she was scheduled to be on. Oh well.

We went over to get our gear bags and tshirts. The gear they gave us this year seemed less than they did at the Wine and Dine 1/2 marathon last year. I could swear I got a pin that I didn't have to pay for. On the positive side, the shirt was not black (grey), so that is nice. I'm wearing it right now actually. We checked the official merch tent too, and even that seemed much smaller than the 1/2 marathon. Much less opportunity to spend our money.
We checked out the outside vendor tables, we got ourselves some running lights (from a vendor that happened to be from very close to my home town, I've eaten at his restaurant before).

Day of the race we decided to have a dinner at Boma about 5 hours before the race started. If I had stopped myself at one plate, I would have been ok. I did not however. This would come back to me later in the race. Not terribly, but still enough.
We hit the bus from the Wilderness Lodge at around 8:15, which is around when they tell you to. Actually, they say no later than 8:30pm, so we were cutting it close to the end, which I still find silly. It still gave us tons of time at the event before the race. We were kind of lucky, the temperature was in the low 70s, which was a break compared to the previous night.

We checked our bags. I threw my backup phone charger, clothes to change into, and identification into my gear bag to have after the race. I probably should have snuck a hotel towel in there too in hindsight.

From there, we walked into the runners only area, wandered around drinking water and looking at costumes, sitting and talking to a nice dude who was running the race barefoot, hit the portapottys a few times, and in general just got ourselves ready for the race. It still felt like I had a plate of undigested Boma sitting in my stomach. Took a chance to snap a selfie right before splitting up.

Around 9:15 we headed into our separate corrals. I found it silly that we had to get in there so early, with the race starting at 10:00pm, but we only stood there for about 15 minutes before they started moving our corrals towards the starting line. It was a pretty long walk from the staging area over to the starting line. We got to the starting line probably around 20 minutes before the race start. They had a few MCs playing some music and talking, trying to hype people up, talking to Jeff Galloway the runDisney guru, someone from Autism Speaks, the main charity of the race, etc. The 20 minutes actually went pretty quickly, because before you really knew it

That was the start of the race, corral A. I was in corral D, so I had a few minutes to wait. Each corral has fireworks to start out with. During this race, they put about 2 minutes between corrals, which seemed much shorter than the 1/2 marathon last year.

Corral D stepped off about 6 minutes after corral A, so I was off. In a HUGE improvement over last years 1/2 marathon, I was able to actually RUN right from the starting gun. I spent the first mile last year basically walking because of the jam-packed roads. This year, I was able to get into my groove right away.

The track was mostly road running. The 1/2 marathon ran through 3 of the 4 parks, but the 10-miler just ran through ESPN and DHS. That means a lot of the race was mostly a down-and-back on Oceola Parkway. We ran down to DAK's entrance, looped around, and ran back past where we entered that road, turned into ESPN via a pretty awesome dirt path through the trees, then ran around ESPN for a while (running around the baseball track was pretty cool, lots of spectators there to cheer us all on). By ESPN, we were at miles 6 and 7. A little after mile 7 I started to flag a bit. The last 3 miles were basically me just counting down miles until the end. "Next mile marker is mile 8, then it's just 9 and 10"... repeat.

The course had plenty of opportunities to meet and greet with villains. Jafar, The Queen of Hearts, The Wicked Queen, Ghosts, etc. My favorite was Hades, up on the bridge on the way back into DHS, throwing fireballs into the sky. I didn't stop for pictures though, because I was running at a really good pace, so I wanted to see how long I could keep it up.

Mile 8 was really where I started to slow down. My pace for mile 7 and mile 8 dropped by about 15s / mile. That was the point when my inner dialog said "just finish...just finish...just finish...".

The good thing is the last mile is in Hollywood Studios, which helps lift the spirits. They really bring out Cast members, and then all of the racer's family and friends, to make you run that last little bit. I thought I was dying through this area, but ended up running what might have been my fastest split in that last mile.

Crossing the finish line was such a good feeling. I did the 1/2 marathon last year, but this year I really pushed myself (based on how I trained) and had a better than expected race.

I'll say this though, my legs were wobbly at first. As I walked through the finishers chute, a few Disney folks did gently ask me if I was ok. I was. Quite happy in fact. Sorry for the big watermark here. I'm too cheap to pay $25 for this picture.

The one big downfall here was the walk to pick up our bag from bag check. The race finished at Tower of Terror. Bag pickup was at Indiana Jones. We had to take back service roads all the way. It felt like a 2 mile walk. Google Maps tells me it's only 0.6 miles. I think Google Maps is a liar.

Bag check done, first thing I did was grab a beer. Then I went to find friends. @Tiggerish and @abeachchick and Tiggerish's husband were hanging out by the Big ... Hat. I made it over there JUST in time to miss @George run by, who started out a bit after me. Oh well. A few beers were consumed, I changed into real clothes, and we met up with another WDWMagic friend @Monty for some rides and more drinks. We tried to hit Rock and Roller Coaster first, but it was a 75 minute wait!!! No way. We hit Toy Story and Star Tours where I got to meet:

I felt as tired as I looked.

Then we hit up Tower of Terror and Rock and Roller coaster at around 3am, who's lines were walk-on at that point. Those rides are so much fun!

We closed the parks, heading out just about 3:30am on the dot.

Overall, it was a really fantastic time. I think they put on such a good race. It's pricey, but what a ton of fun!

 

[Tiggerish]

Just got back to Bradenton, but I wanted to say it was really neat getting together with all of you today. DH still thinks I'm nuts talking to strangers on the internet, but he agreed that you are all a great group!

I'm so glad that you made the drive up to have breakfast with us, and now at least your DH and mine know that they're not alone. Maybe next year they'll form their own group "husbands whose wives talk to strangers on the internet". At least he only called us "strangers" and not "weirdos". That means we were successfully able to hide our true nature from him.

 

[Tiggerish]

My wife was asking me to stop and find one of the speakers because she was a blogger that my wife follows (Disney Bound I think?!?),

I don't follow Disney Bound, but I've heard of it. I noticed Disneybounders ALL OVER the place last weekend.

 

[Nemo14]

I'm so glad that you made the drive up to have breakfast with us, and now at least your DH and mine know that they're not alone. Maybe next year they'll form their own group "husbands whose wives talk to strangers on the internet". At least he only called us "strangers" and not "weirdos". That means we were successfully able to hide our true nature from him.

He has no idea....