November Races

Way back last year when I was dreaming up this idea that I would do 20 races in 2020, I thought that it should culminate with a half marathon in Disney World (since Disneyland doesn’t want to be cool anymore). I knew they had a Wine & Dine Race Weekend in November because it always took place one weekend before the Super Heroes Half Marathon Weekend. And since our participation in the Super Heroes was a lock every year, Wine & Dine just didn’t seem like it was going to happen. But then runDisney West Coast went away and here we were.

In early March we signed up for the Wine & Dine race weekend with Ricky and Kyla. When everything shut down, I figured that things would maybe be back to normal in November. Yes, my stupidity knows no bounds. However, by the time June rolled around, it was not surprising in the least that runDisney officially cancelled the Wine & Dine weekend.

The big bummer was that we had somehow missed the SUPER SECRET SIGN-UP DATE runDisney Virtual Summer Series. A VIRTUAL RACE. WHERE YOU CAN JUST MAKE AS MANY MEDALS AS YOU NEED. It makes TOTAL SENSE that runDisney would want to sell out during a pandemic and not make room for all the folks who had wanted to participate in any of their races. Not like runDisney to pull something like that, AT ALL (sarcasm). It was beginning to look like I was going to have to be disappointed.

Two heart-broken-ly weeks later, I got an email from a different company that sells medal holders at runDisney expos. They were advertising medal holders for the summer series. I was about to angrily delete the email when I remembered getting very upset hearing that you can purchase THE MEDALS with the medal holders. I will spare you my rant about that. All you need to know is that THIS is where I saw the opportunity to get those Disney races in this year.

I quickly checked the website and for their cheapest medal holder with medals, it was $165. I found a discount coupon that brought that down to $145 and free shipping – which for those of you playing at home, is about $30 more than the whole series costs. The medals and holders wouldn’t ship until later August or September, but it seemed totally legit! If runDisney didn’t want our money, this place would take our money AND send us medals; and as long as we were going to run to earn these medals, I didn’t feel an ounce of guilt for doing it this way. Everyone in our original group decided to follow suit and we paid our money and crossed our fingers that medals would show up in the fall.

And they did.

We knocked out two of the 10ks (which were supposed to be 5ks, but those seem too easy at this point!) in the first week of November which is when we were supposed to be in Florida. And also just because the weather was cooperating and we didn’t want to chance November snow storms. We used our tried and true Jordan River Trail which was spectacularly pretty purely for our benefit.

We could have called it a year at that point, but we had one more medal to earn that sick challenge medal, so we were going to find a nice enough day to do our final 10k. Unfortunately, the weather was not willing to cooperate and the only day where we were both free and able to go running was the final Sunday in November. And Kyla’s daughter just found out that her daughter was exposed to the rona. So we couldn’t meet in person to go running.

Fortunately for me, Chad was willing to go with me on the Sandy trail and it wasn’t too freezing cold to enjoy the run. Fortunately for Kyla, she has will power and a treadmill. As I was finishing the last bit of my run, I wheezed to Chad that I wasn’t running anymore in 2020. This was it. I wouldn’t run a step in December. And I plan to stick by that.