I spent most of last week at the Walt Disney World Marathon Weekend. Yep. I know. A weekend is a weekend. Two days. But this weekend is now a week and that’s great.
The first time I went to, what was, the WDW Marathon Weekend was in 1999 as part of the Runner’s World Pace Team. I couldn’t have been more excited. I had only been to Disney World once before, in 1974, when my son was 3 years old. Walt Disney World in 1974 was The Magic Kingdom, at that was about it. You bought packs of tickets that were lettered to indicate what ride you could get on. The BIG rides, like Space Mountain, required an “E” ticket. You still hear people refer to something exciting as an “E” ticket ride. And that’s where it came from.
Being there with the Runner’s World team was magical – if you pardon the expression. The column “The Penguin Chronicles” had only been in the magazine for a couple of years and there were already signs that the “Second Running Boom” was getting traction and that the running event industry was going to change. Gone were the days when only skinny dudes showed up and tried to run marathons in under 3 hours. By 1999 the tide was shifting.
I was leading the 5-hour pace team. 5 hours. That was our goal. It wasn’t an absolute. We kinda wanted to run it in 5 hours, but, a lot depended on how many characters we saw and how often we stopped for photos. My buddy Sid – a now retired Navy Senior Chief – was there with me then and he was there at the expo this year. I think Sid is as much a part of the WDW Marathon Weekend as Mickey and Minnie.
The event has expanded from a marathon, to a half and a full marathon on the same day, do a half on Saturday and a full on Sunday – the “Goofy Race and a Half Challenge” to the “Dopey” challenge of running a 5K on Thursday, 10K on Friday, half-marathon on Saturday, and full marathon on Sunday. Not everyone does every event, but this year some 7,000 of the total of 65,000 participants took on the Dopey challenge.
And that’s how the weekend turned into a week. And that’s how the singular challenge of finishing a marathon in a specific time turned into enjoy 1, 2, 3, or 4 days of running and walking and taking photographs in the theme parks. Even the most visionary of us would never have predicted the number and kinds of participants that are at the WDW Marathon these days.
But I like to think that Sid, and I, and the others that paced with us back in 1999 had a little to do with it. We had a soft goal, of finishing in 5 hours, and a hard goal, of having the most fun we could possibly have on a marathon course in the happiest place on earth. We accomplished both goals that day.
So to everyone who was there – to everyone who wanted to be there – and to everyone who is thinking about being there in 2015 – all I can say is that the experience is unlike anything else on earth. It is the best “E” ticket ride that there’s ever been.
Waddle on,
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