Orlando - Team RiceCracker

We visit Florida to take on the Dopey Challenge.

Race Report: Dopey Challenge (Marathon Leg)

The Dopey Challange: 48.6 miles over 4 races and 4 days. A 5K, a 10K, a half marathon (21K), and a marathon (42K). Annie told me that she always wanted to give this a shot. At this point, we had two whole marathons under our belt. In retrospect, this was a bigger challenge than we realized. True to form, we decided to crack on and give it a shot. I utilized a trend-setting and now all too familiar approach: I did not run at all during the two months leading up to the race. Gosh, I wonder how that worked out ….

The course for each day is a big loop and as flat as you imagine Florida to be. More or less, you are running around Disney World. What you don’t realize is that Disney World is much smaller than you think. The 5k pretty much covers it all on the first day. That means the following days are spent running around roads and/or parking lots. It’s LESS exciting than it sounds.

This particular year, the weather was incredibly cold. It was about 35℉ and raining the entire time. What are the odds of that? According to the race directors, it was all but unheard of. As you can imagine, there was a huge number of runners who showed up ill-prepared for this kind of temperature. Everyone raided the local shops and bought anything they could to stay warm. We ran in holiday sweaters.

To make things even more exciting, a major storm passed through the night before/morning of the half marathon. Due to lightning and for the safety of runners, the half marathon was officially canceled. What were we to do? I hadn’t trained at all and we had come all this way to run this dumb thing. Well, we, and many other runners, took to the streets of Orlando. We slogged it out on our own, freezing in the rain and wind, stomping out 13.1 miles on principal.

While I am glad we did what we set out to do, 48.6 miles over 4 days; the last day was pretty rough. The cold and miles took its toll on me. I finished the marathon nearly 20 minutes after Annie and in a pretty laughable state. What cha gunna do? We’re finishers, not front-of-the-pack’ers. By golly, we finished.