Excalibur 10 Miler Race Recap

So I need to start with a bit of back story for this race recap. This race happened to land on the weekend after general registration for the Wine and Dine half marathon weekend. When I registered for this race, this fact didn't seem significant. I had already purchased my bib for Wine and Dine race weekend through a travel agent and so wouldn't be fighting with opening day registration drama. But the week prior during passholder registration, it came out that the POT pace requirements had been updated and runDisney would only be accepting POTs for 2:30 or faster half marathon times. General registration confirmed that this was not a mistake and all of my beautiful POTs including my new PR from Princess weekend were now useless......

I had been chasing that sub 2:30 half (and equivalent 10k) because that would have gotten me into the next corral and I was so close but I had not yet made it. This all really sucked for me because there was not going to be great running weather between the release of this new POT requirement and the deadline in August because summer starts way early in Florida. Guess I was going to have to have a pretty ambitious time goal for my first 10 miler so I could have a POT for Wine and Dine 2020 and Marathon Weekend 2021.

COVID-19 was starting to pop up more and more in the US and some people were already freaking out about it but I wasn't too concerned until Thursday afternoon before race weekend when I got a message from a friend (who also wanted to use this race as a runDisney POT race) that the race was canceled. I was really upset. I was already not happy at runDisney for changing the POT requirements with no warning and now I wouldn't even have a shot at a POT because people couldn't wait to freak out about the coronavirus until Monday. Plus, I had only just registered for the race and there would be no refunds or options to defer until next year. I really felt like I had just flushed a whole bunch of money down the toilet. Since I didn't need to taper any more, I headed to the gym for some serious strength training and angst relieving activities.

 Disney also announced that they were closing both parks for the remainder of the month so the next day, Will and I went to Epcot for our last Disney trip for a while. That really helped my mood and made me feel better about the race cancelation. I had run runDisney races in nonPOT corrals before and had a great time. Plus I knew if I ran the first half of the race fast, I could still do lots of character stops with short lines near the end of the race. It was going to be OK.

I decided to run the race as a virtual so I could still feel like I earned my medal. I took my 10 miles nice and easy on Saturday morning. It ended up being a really nice run. We had picked up our race packets including t-shirt and medal on Friday on the way home from Disney so my medal was waiting for me when I got done with my run. In the end, crap happens. Races get canceled. You may have to DNS. But staying upset about it doesn't change anything. Keeping up my commitment to training and working towards my fitness goals will change things.

Right now, the rest of my spring running season is so up in the air. I'm still working to maintain my half marathon base for the Star Wars Rival Run in April but we'll have to see if the parks reopen at the end of March or if Disney decides to keep them closed. I'm also working towards my next Spartan race which is in early May. (They have also canceled all events through mid April.) There is a definite chance that either one or both of these races will get canceled or postponed but until then, I'm going to keep training as if they are going to happen. Races will not be canceled forever and when I get to run my next race, I want to be ready to crush it.