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Our alarm clock went off at 3:00 a.m.! Holy cow, Disney! We get it – you want everyone to get through and out of your parks before they open, but that is one early wake up call for a 5:45 a.m. race not to mention you HAD to be in your corral by 5:00 a.m. or ELSE! Ha (Guess who wasn’t in their corral by 5:00 a.m.??) We got dressed in our princess costumes and were out the door of Sheraton Safari by 3:40 a.m. ready to face race traffic.  Pretty sure we in the car for an hour which gave us time to make peanut butter sandwiches to keep us fueled.

Yummy - peanut butter sandwiches made with Beth's finger! Ha

Once we parked we had a good 20 minute walk to our corral, so we decided to not stop to use the rest room because it was slight madness. Plus we were running late at this point to get into the corral on time.  When we got to the corral area we knew that Heidi was in corral B so we began looking for her just knowing we would see her at the front of that corral.  Good thing we started looking early because there were Heidi & Brian at the front of corral C. Apparently if you are a Prince running this race you can’t go any higher up than corral C.

such a colorful picture!

We are not quite sure how it happened but we both were assigned the same corral for like the first time EVER and we were in corral A! It was awesome to be up front in a line of 20,000 people!

see how close we were to the start line?

We started right on time! Way to go Disney and since we had made getting to our corral a priority over anything else we both decided to make an immediate stop at the first port-o-potties we spotted on the course!  The whole first of half of the race flew by so it’s hard to remember everything by miles totally.  Our plan was to run together, treat it as a training run and take pictures with characters when we wanted to do so.  The competitive side to both of us still lives on a bit in that we still wanted a decent time despite the stops, but again we were fortunate to be in corral A because this gave us the advantage of being in front of thousands of people who would want to stop as well.  We did stop at the first group of characters that we saw….

We loved how real looking the step sisters and Cruella Deville were!

Cinderella's Castle was the half way point of the race

We really didn’t have a plan at who to stop at or what we wanted to do we just knew that we wanted to see our princesses! We ended up stopping at Buzz Lightyear who of course is a favorite not only to us but our little nephews!   As you will find out through our pictures it’s a good thing we stopped because Princess Ariel ended up not being on the course! 🙁

the other side of Cinderella's castle

Somewhere in the mile 7 part of the course we found Beth’s character – Belle!  Wonder what all the characters came up with to say to people as they were having their picture taken because Belle said to Beth “it looks like you’ve been in my closet!”

Speaking of mile markers! We loved the signs for each mile!  At mile 8 we finally snapped a picture of one:

There were a couple of hills in the last few miles and thanks to one of the toy soldiers from Toy Story for the encouragement to conquer the hill in  mile 10.  It was amazing how his voice was exactly like the movie!  We’ve said before we aren’t really big on stopping and starting on a run which is completely a personal preference we both share.  The picture breaks were hard on our bodies, but we pressed on despite that.  In hindsight it might have been a blessing in disguise that Ariel was not seen out there because our last stop at Belle was rough!  Our bodies might have been hurting but  with the kick we gave it at the end you never would have known!  If you look at our runkeeper entries for this race Teal finished her last .1 in a 6:20 pace and Beth finished in her last .1 in a 8:03 pace.  Perhaps this speaks to how it’s hard to have a GPS device be completely accurate as we crossed the finish line right next to each other.  A more accurate pace would probably be an average of the two times something more in the 7 minute range.  We were hauling!  We are really good at keep training runs JUST training runs. 🙂

Half Marathon number eight is in the bag!  We did and our very proud of ourselves!  Our official time was 2:13:35 exactly for both of us, and we tried to stop and start our runkeeper when would take picture breaks because we wanted to know the difference :), so that time was 2:03:49.  By the time we were finished both of us had A LOT of our fuel for the race leftover – swedish fish.  Once Teal got some ice on her foot and knee and Beth put biofreeze on her knees and calves we grabbed our checked bag and were out of there to find food. We were staaaarving!

Isn't it purdy?

So now we have 1/2 of the Coast to Coast challenge finished and just need to complete Disneyland Half Marathon in September which we thankfully got signed up in time as it was sold out before we left for the Princess Half!  Check back with us tomorrow to see what all we did in the non racing parts of the weekend! 🙂