On to Day 3, Half Marathon day! Another early morning wakeup. Today I was dressed loosely as Goofy, wearing my Goofy Challenge race shirt from 2015. Once again, the race started right outside Epcot. But this time, we had to take about a mile walk out to one of the service roads behind the park.
After the fireworks, we were off for 13.1 magical miles! The first 5 miles or so take you from that road outside Epoct up to Magic Kingdom. Lots of character stops, music, and even movie clips playing on big screens to keep us entertained along the way.
About mile 3, you pass under the Magic Kingdom toll booth. An iconic moment for Disney races.
There really is nothing like running down Main Street USA with the castle right in front of you and tons of spectators along the side cheering everybody on. Since Marathon weekend happens the first week of January, they keep the castle dream lights on for the runners, and light them up for the half and full marathons. I’m usually a little too slow to be there in the dark, but you can still see the lights in the daylight.
Once we ran down Main Street, we made a right towards Tomorrowland, then onto Fantasyland. The other best part of these courses is running through the castle.
Continuing on through Magic Kingdom, we made our way through Liberty Square and Frontierland, before exiting the park through backstage. This backstage area is where the daily parade starts and where some of the parade floats are kept. They usually have one of the floats on display for the runners to get pictures with.
This back service road then connects to Floridian Way, which runs behind the Grand Floridian and the Polynesian hotels as well as a couple golf courses. While the views here are great, this is generally one of my least favorite parts of the course as the roadway is very narrow, making it hard to slow down/speed up or pass people. It gets very congested and is infamously referred to as cone alley.
Miles 7-12 take you from running from outside Magic Kingdom back to Epcot. But again, lots of entertainment along the way. The green army men do a great job pushing you, I mean encouraging you, to get up the hill of the overpass, and even making some people do pushups 😉
For the half marathon, we entered through a backstage entry towards the front of Epcot. Then made our way up through the center of the park, past Spaceship Earth, then turned back around and ran out the other side of the front of the park.
The half and full marathons are notorious for having the Gospel choir sing you home to the finish line, and they did not disappoint.
After crossing the finish line, we now had 3 out of 4 races done, but still not even halfway through the miles. 22.4 miles down, 26.2 miles to go!
It's a Magical Life 