My 1st Disney Marathon: A Lesson in Humility

As I crossed the finish line at the 2022 Walt Disney World Marathon, a culmination of several months of training and anticipation for my first in-person marathon, it wasn’t joy, pride, or exuberance that I felt. It was relief. It was over. Everything hurt and I was not okay. I shuffled through the long path picking up a water, a Powerade, my medal (which was very cool, but somewhat lost on me at the moment), my marathon Mickey ears, a food box, and a “victory” banana. Hoping for somewhere to set everything down for a few minutes to collect myself, I settled for the worst option: sitting on the ground. Dehydrated and in agony, I couldn’t figure out if drinking fluids made me feel better or worse. My wife found me on the ground in a sad, sweaty heap and she exclaimed “You did it!” All I could reply with was the only thought repeating in my mind, “Why does anyone do this more than once?”

I could succinctly describe where I went wrong as overconfident and underprepared. The marathon is not a distance to mess around with, and a lot can go wrong over the course of 26.2 miles. Some people make their mistakes during training (or lack thereof). Some people make their mistakes in the pre-race preparations. I estimate most people make their mistakes during the marathon. I happened to make just about every mistake possible. But as I tell my kids, sometimes we have to make mistakes so we can learn from them. Safe to say I learned a lot from my first real marathon. I am certainly a far cry away from cleaning up all my mistakes and I still learn something new each marathon I run. When I reflect on that warm January day in 2022 I would say I made seven critical mistakes that knocked my first WDW Marathon for a loop.

1. I trained all wrong

I truly knew nothing when I first set out in my marathon training. I found a plan, I stuck to the plan, and I completed the plan. Except… I trained all wrong. I believed that I could “tough it out”, training like I was 25 instead of 35. I did not understand the concept of “easy runs”, so I pretty much ran at the same pace for every training run. Which was probably faster than I should have been running. I also foolishly believed that training underhydrated and underfueled would somehow make me stronger on race day. Because of course it makes sense to deprive yourself of essential water, electrolytes, and energy, right?!? No – I simply trained my body the wrong way, and I paid for it in the end when I raced the same way and fell apart.

2. I forgot my watch

Okay, this one is pretty minor but it did have a negative effect. I’ve heard plenty of stories and advice to ignore the paces and running times of your fitness tracker on race day, instead allowing your body to “run on vibes”. I’m sure there’s plenty of merit to this, and in truth I had a very basic activity tracker that I pretty much just used for mile split times. But for my first real marathon I probably needed some concrete benchmark on my mile times to keep me in check. Instead I was constantly doing math at each mile marker to try to figure out how fast I was going. Not to mention with the staggered start times (I found myself in the equivalent of Corral C having run a 4:27 virtual marathon a few months earlier) I kept trying to calculate my actual running time with little success.

3. I did not account for weather, in this case the heat and humidity

As a more mature runner, I have basically become the most annoying weatherman in any benign conversation.

Anyone: “How about this cold snap?”

Me: “Tell me about it, although it should warm up to the low 50s in the afternoon each day this week… except Thursday will be pretty windy with gusts up to 22 miles per hour sweeping in from the west… it might rain a bit on Friday but Saturday morning should be cool and calm so that’ll be a good day for a long run, especially once the sun comes up.”

Anyone: “…”

But alas, on that day in January in Lake Buena Vista it was hot and humid. Having trained in the late fall and early winter in chilly Mid-Atlantic temperatures, I found myself at the starting line of the WDW Marathon just north of 70 degrees with high humidity. As I circled the now-dreaded Blizzard Beach parking lot at sunrise, the heat rose and my spirits dwindled. A more experienced runner would have adjusted their strategy on race day. But I was not that experienced runner, and I melted like the wings of Icarus.

4. I started out (and stayed) too fast

A very common mistake that I fell victim to was starting out faster than I anticipated on race day. I told myself I wanted to maintain around a 9:00 minute per mile pace to hit a solid 4-hour marathon time, which was a slower pace than I trained for months earlier. Perhaps having a watch or fitness tracker could have helped me stay consistent, but instead I found myself running an estimated pace between 8:00-8:30 minutes per mile throughout the first half marathon. Could I have slowed myself down? Yep. Unfortunately I let pride take the wheel as I weaved in and out crowds of people (another mistake – more a biproduct of running from a corral slower than your ability), adding at least an extra half-mile to the race and tiring me out in the process. I’ll bank time now for when I eventually slow down! Not how it works, as I learned.

5. I let myself get dehydrated

As you can probably tell by now, I the mistakes all started building off of each other into a rats nest of a marathon. Heat plus running too hard led to heavy sweating. I’m already a heavy sweater, but on this day my shirt was completely soaked through within the first few miles. This would not have been too difficult to overcome if I had stopped at the water stations for water and Powerade. So guess what I did – I ran right by them! I had a small handheld water bottle that I thought would suffice, but given I trained myself to run dehydrated I thought I could race in hotter, more humid weather with the same lack of hydration. By the time I finally broke down and spent more time with electrolytes it was too late. The dehydration set in quickly, which led to cramping and my next mistake…

6. I stopped taking in fuel

With my stomach in knots the thought of adding fuel (in this case I chose Gu energy gels) made me feel even sicker. So about halfway through the race I stopped taking them. With energy out and nothing going in, something finally happened that I had not experienced in training: I bonked. I hit the wall early, after getting through 18, 19, 20-mile training runs with little trouble. Now I found myself at mile 17 struggling to keep going. I now knew what it felt like to tell my legs and body to go and my body screaming “NOOOOO!”

After I hobbled/trotted/walked my way through my final few miles, I didn’t think I’d ever want to run another marathon. But two things happened. First, I missed by goal time by 99 seconds. As tough as the race was for me, I thought maybe I eked out a 4:00 marathon. But no – 4:01:39. Now I was certainly proud of finishing in a respectable time, but as days went by the extra 99 seconds gnawed at me. I couldn’t stop just short of my goal – I knew with enough tweaks I could do better. Second, having run (and struggled) through the WDW Marathon, I realized that I did it wrong. I didn’t stop for characters, I didn’t stop for pictures around the parks, and I didn’t take it all in. In short, I didn’t have fun. You can go for PR’s at any other marathon. You go to runDisney events to enjoy running. When I returned for the 2023 Dopey Challenge, I didn’t run my fastest races by a longshot. But figured out where I went wrong the year before and enjoyed every last mile.