The 2013 Disney’s Princess Half Marathon has now come and gone and I am so sad that it’s over.

While I will save the full recap for another day, I can’t wait to share some of the basics with you now.

A Tough Race

Let me start out by saying this was one of the toughest races of my “career” thus far.  As you know from my last post, I was still hoping for a PR going into this race.  Spoiler alert – it didn’t happen but I still feel pretty good about this race.

The days leading up to the race were full of stress about the weather.  While I know it’s not worth stressing over things you can’t control, the weather turned out to be exactly what I had feared…hot and humid!  I think it was nearly 70 degrees at the start and just shy of 100% humidity and it clearly wasn’t getting any cooler.  Luckily, I planned to finish in 2 hours or less so at least it wouldn’t get hotter, right?

So, How Did It Turn Out?

It was a tough race and took a ton of mental strength but I managed to keep a fairly strong, steady pace throughout.  I knew as we approached Magic Kingdom (around the 5 mile marker) that I was feeling much worse than I have at that point in the race in years past.  I tried to stay steady but I knew this was going to take focus and concentration to hold this race together.

While my average pace was as low as 8:55 at the 10 k split, I ultimately finished the race with an average pace of 9:07 and a final time of 1:59:33.

While it was hard to be too excited about my time since it was about 7 minutes slower than Tink, I was pretty proud of myself given the race day conditions.  Plus hey, headed into Tink, I would have been ecstatic to get any sub-2 time.  Heck, it’s only the my second sub-2 half ever and that’s something to be proud of.  I have no doubt that I have a PR again in my not-too-distant future but this was not going to be the day.  It was too hot and too humid to run the same race as the nice and brisk Tink just one month later.  It would have been difficult to really make any significant fitness gains in that amount of time even in ideal conditions but I can tell you, the way the weather made me feel was a night and day difference.

As Princess always is, it was still a magical weekend and a magical race day.  I had so much fun running my first race in costume (which worked out really well and chafe-free I might add) and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.  I am already looking forward to my next race and especially my next chance to runDisney again in the fall!  You know you really love to run when you have a blah race and you still can’t wait to do it again…hopefully race day will just feel better next time though.

I can’t wait to give you the play-by-play of the weekend soon!  I have some achilles tendon funky-ness today so I decided to take the day off to relax, stress, and use my new foam roller.  With just 2 months till my next half, it’s time to buckle down, work hard, and kick butt!  In the meantime, I need to distract myself from my Princess Half depression and withdrawal symptoms…maybe wearing my newly acquired bling around the house will ease the anguish?  haha

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Did you run the 2013 Disney’s Princess Half Marathon?  How was your race day?