After finishing the half-marathon with my coworker Hannah (who set a 10-minute PR, despite serious humidity!), I woke on Sunday to face the final gauntlet: The Disney Marathon, the final 26.2 miles of my epic Dopey journey. My first three races went without a hitch. Every day we woke around 3:00 a.m., drove to Epcot, promptly wiped our brains clean of where we parked at Epcot, and crossed the starting line of the 5K, 10K, or half-marathon to one of the horrific selections from this article I wrote on the worst music to have stuck in your head on a run (which I can only surmise runDisney read and misinterpreted as a playlist of universally beloved pump-up jams). (…Is it possible to become desensitized to the magic of fireworks, and if so, could that be the most egregious example of #firstworldproblems of all time?) The first three days of racing were a strange mashup of fun-filled animated entertainment, sleep deprivation, and the movie Groundhog Day. Race weekend kicked off with the 5K and usual Disney fanfare and fireworks. I would run those 48.6 miles with my clumsy dwarven head held high. If it took 48.6 miles to have crowds yell “GO DOPEY!” at me as I deliriously trudged past- just as I imagine they did in those grocery stores 30 years ago-then so be it. So needless to say, Dopey and his six dwarven cohorts remain near and dear to my heart. So deep was my four-year-old self-identity wrapped up in the mute Dopey persona that I declined to answer to any name but “Dopey” for months, which led to a number of situations in which my mom had to scream, “DOPEY! GET BACK HERE!” across a crowded grocery store in order to summon me, and potentially child services. Naturally, right? What little girl wouldn’t want to assume the identity of a stubby, hiccupping buffoon perpetually exasperating his elders? It didn’t hurt that as a child I had one Disney character obsession, and that was not with the glamorous princess canon but with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’ Dopey. So obviously I had to sign up for the Dopey Challenge. That doesn’t mean running those races is actually easy-we’re still talking about 26.2+ miles here! I’m simply describing what it feels like to sign up for a runDisney event, which is to say when presented the option to register for a 48.6-mile expedition through Disney’s hinterlands, all other combinations of distances start to sound like a turkey trot. But this year runDisney cursed us with the 48.6-mile Dopey Challenge, which had the strange effect of making the Goofy Challenge seem like a breezy, everyday color run, and the basic Disney Marathon like a walk across the room to pull a beer out of the fridge. Last year I ran the ludicrous-to-me-at-the-time Goofy Challenge, which consisted of chasing a half-marathon with a full marathon the following day. You just can’t fight the power of Big Mouse to overload your senses with delight. Yet once again the Happiest Place on Earth cut through a good 90 percent of my cynicism, and I found myself on a one-way Magical Express ride to joyous delirium and childlike wonder. I flew to Orlando determined not to get too caught up in the calculated-nostalgia engine driven by Mickey and associates, and just to be safe, forced two coworkers to solemnly swear on a copy of Disney’s Bible Classics that they would physically stop me from getting a Fantasia tattoo during our deployment at Disney. Play icon The triangle icon that indicates to playīut this year I was better prepared to face those animated corporate overlords at Disney.
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