Goofy Challenge

Goofy Marathon and Half

One Marathon

One Half Marathon

2 days, 4 Theme Parks

39.3 miles

Well, Terri and I completed the WDW Goofy Challenge last weekend. That means we ran (walked, really) 13.1 miles on Saturday, and we ran (crawled/limped) 26.2 miles on Sunday. We earned our Goofy medals in honor of Chandler, who I promised a Goofy medal over three years ago.

It wasn't pretty.

We started out Saturday morning with the half marathon. This race was great because we completly blew our time in the Magic Kingdom getting our pictures taken with every Disney character we could find. Those pictures are all on Terri's camera and we haven't had them developed yet, but they will be published soon. We finished the half with an extra five minutes to spare (we wouldn't qualify for the Goofy if we didn't finish in 3 and a half hours), and if I had any idea that we wasted 30 minutes getting our mugs snapshotted, I would have hurried us out of there in case of emergency at the end of the race. But who cares now, because we made it!

We made it through the half marathon without much drama, although Terri's knee started bothering her around mile 11. With only two miles to go, she gutted it out and finished at her normal pace. We went to the med tent and iced it immediately, and when we got back to the hotel, I e-stimmed it to get it ready for Sunday's race.

Sunday morning started out great. We had decided our strategy would be for Terri to walk (at her freakishly fast pace, especially for a short person) and I would jog at my comfortable pace ahead of her and I would stop and walk slowly until she caught up with me. That way, I didn't get worn out trying to walk at her pace, and she didn't have to try to jog with me. We stayed on the right hand side of the road on the dotted line, so that it was easy for us to find each other amongst the other 24,998 runners.

This worked great for the first 9 miles. In fact, I wished we had employed this technique for the half, because it might have kept Terri from getting hurt in the first place. Our goal was to finish the race. Not to set any time records or impress our friends. We needed to finish. We needed the medal for Chandler.

Well, unfortunately, Terri decided to try to pick up her pace by jogging right at the 10th mile, and she tweaked her knee again, pretty severely this time. We stopped and tried to create a Cho-Pat band for her knee out of a hanky, and I rubbed it down with BioFreeze, but it wasn't helping at all. I ran ahead to a med tent around mile 11, and they told me that there wasn't much they could do, that she would probably get swept up (meaning she wasn't keeping a fast enough pace to stay on the course, and she was going to have to get on a bus and ride to the finish). So, I ran back to her (yes, this added about another half mile each way for me, so I actually went 27.2, but that's beside the point) and I told her the news. She used some choice words, and decided to try to keep going. When we caught up to the med tent, they wrapped an ice pack on her knee and we kept moving.

Five minutes later, Terri tossed the ice bag to the side of the road, (again, using some adult language on what she thought of the treatment), and we continued to try to walk it out. The bus was quickly approaching us. Another 10 minutes of trying to gingerly walk on this knee, and Terri was having pain in both heels from compensating. We stopped. We added blister pads to her heels under her socks. Five minutes later we stopped again to try taking the insoles out of her shoes. Five minutes after that we stopped to put the insoles back in. Nothing was helping.

By this time, we were about 12 to 12.5 miles in. A medic on a bike saw her struggle and asked what was wrong. We told him, and proceeded to tape both of her developing blisters and he ace-wrapped her knee. Two other EMTs on bikes (the dreaded sweepers) rode up and tried to get her to get on the bus. She refused. They said, "Are you going to try to keep going?" and she said, "I came here to finish." We were about 30 seconds from the official sweep, but somehow, she managed to cross the line and continue. It was insane.

Onward for another couple of grueling miles out of Magic Kingdom and moving towards Animal Kingdom, we kept up our walking at a 16 mile per hour pace, keeping the TNT pacers in our sights. We knew that we had to be ahead of them going out of AK or we were out of the race. Every time we got near a hard sweep (meaning they won't negotiate with you--they will pull you from the field), I would run ahead to cross the mile marker and would scream back to her to hurry hurry hurry! In the mean time, I had texted Brett to tell our family to get as close to us as they could so they could get me the e-stim and we could use it to finish the run. Bless their hearts, they paid $12 to drive into the parking lot of AK to give us the stim, but there was a hard sweep, so we couldn't stop to even put the machine on. Terri made it through that sweep by 8 seconds. Only about 5 people behind her made the cut. Everyone else was yanked from the field at about mile 18.

I held onto the stim for about 10 minutes, and realized that there was no way we were going to have time to get that stim on her knee because we were literally being chased by the bus the entire way. I was already carrying the fanny pack with her phone, her camera, our Biofreeze, our Tylenol, the blister pads, and her failed hanky/knee brace, and I had the rental car keys shoved in the left leg of my running shorts spandex and my phone on the right side. I was running out of room to carry much more. So I did what anyone else would do--I shoved the e-stim down my bra for the last 8 miles of the trip. At this point, I was a walking med tent.

During all of this time, I was trying to track our pace with my iPod Nike + chip and I was watching the pacers, who had a Garmin. It was very obvious that if I stayed right with Terri, she would slow way down and the pacers would get way out in front of us. But if I jogged ahead of the pacers and then turned and encouraged her, she could keep pace. This was our only hope if we were going to finish. I estimate that I probably ran 2-3 of those last 12 miles backwards, which worked out fine until I tripped over a cone in Epcot at mile 25 and almost fell on my ass in front of 1,000 spectators. Ah, well. I'll never see those people again.

Eventually Terri somehow got her 47th wind, and we were actually 2 minutes ahead of the bus. How this happened I will never know. Honestly, the last 4 miles of the race are sort of a blur. I do recall thinking, "This isn't Goofy. This is just stupid." But I think Terri put it best when she said, "They shouldn't call it the Goofy Challenge. They should call it the Assinine Challenge. But nobody wants an Ass medal." HA!

At mile 24 they finally told us that there would be no more sweeps. We were all safe, and we were all going to finish. This was great, except that it gave us hardly any incentive to keep up the pace that we had worked all those miles to keep. Terri's body and brain were on auto-pilot. She was getting a little cranky. I was trying to be the cheerleader from hell, and I was tired of fighting too. We got to the Mile 26 marker and decided to take our pictures since we weren't planning on seeing one of those again for at least another 300 years. We couldn't get her camera to work very well, so that took us probably a couple of minutes to figure out. I think back on it now and I think maybe both of our brains were in a fog and we couldn't figure out how to turn the damn thing on.

We turned the corner out of Epcot and had .2 miles to go. The pacers had finished, and had come back about a tenth of a mile to cheer us on. We stopped to hug them and get our pictures with them, since without them, we would have never known how to keep away from the bus. We made one last stop in front of the finish line so Terri could take another picture of it (and Baby Goofy), and then we sprinted (HA! Just kidding) we limped across the finish line. Unfortunately, since we officially crossed after the pacers, we were counted as DNF--Did Not Finish. They beat us by about 4 minutes. But there is not any doubt in my mind that we went there and did what we set out to do. We finished that Goofy Challenge. We've got the pictures, and the medals, and the war wounds to prove it.

I could not be more proud of Terri Newton. The courage and focus and dedication she exhibited can only really be appreciated by me, since I'm the only one that watched her struggle for 16 horrendous, grueling miles. It proved to me that the human mind can accomplish ANYTHING it sets out to accomplish. I think it was Zig Ziglar that said, "If the dream is big enough, the facts don't count." How true.

Will I be back for another one? I don't know. I don't know that I have the willingness to do the Goofy again. I have a feeling that I am going to try to tackle a marathon to see how I can do, but that remains to be seen. I have no idea how I would have held up running my own race. For now, I'm going to bask in the glory of this race. Because the people at the end of the pack have amazing heart. They are not out there to impress anyone. They barely get any support at the end, because almost everyone has gone back to their hotels to shower. If I ever do another one, I am going to stay until everyone finishes, so they will have at least one loud-mouth cheering them on.

But for now, I don't care what the Disney officials say--WE DID IT!!!

Update: Terri's knee is doing fine. Her heels--not so great. Here is a picture of them right after the race, after we got back to the hotel and showered. I would say they don't look as good as this today. What a whiner!

Of course, I've downplayed my severe blister as well. You will notice in the picture, my right heel, that was obviously not being given the same attention as Terri's and has suffered immeasureable damage. I circled the blister so you could see it. Please feel free to send cards (with money) as part of the "Save Amy's Foot Fund".

And last but not least, here is a picture of Terri and I at Give Kids the World lying next to Chandler's paver with our Goofy medals. Chandler stayed there in 2004 as part of a Make a Wish dream. If you want to learn about GKTW, check out their website at http://www.givekidstheworld.com/.