This gives me great sympathy for any artist that has to write their acknowledgements page.  There isn’t enough room to thank everyone that has made this possible. So I will do some broad sweeping strokes and hope that everyone takes it in the way it was intended:  with heartfelt gratitude and a commitment to paying it forward

Achilles International: A parent organization that takes the success and achievements of its chapters as a win for everyone!

Philly Achilles:  Without this organization and the dedicated volunteers who make the wheels spin, I never would have made it.

Those who ran:  Training with me is interval training, sprints on the down hills and walking on the uphills.  Thank you for keeping me going.

Those who pledged:  I am humbled by the generousity and support.  I reconnected with people that I’d lost touch with.  You are friends from my hometown, elementary school, high school, college, the gym, volunteer work, corporate jobs, acting jobs, and family.  You are spread out around the city, state, country and world, yet you took the time and effort to go through this with me.  When I think of this I feel like the Grinch after his heart grew three sizes.

I am going to skip  naming individuals because this would probably end up being a 10,000 word blog post.  Just know that I know you carted things, smiled, made me laugh, gave me a kick, laughed at my jokes, sat around and waited, talked me down when I got wound up and cheered along the way.

Thank you to all of you!  May you each choose a goal that stretches you physically, mentally and emotionally.

It’s been worth every moment.

All about that race…Well the last post was, so this is just about some of the things that went on aside from race starts and finishes.

What hour is this?:  So for four days in a row I had a 2:00 a.m. wake up call.  Each night I went to bed by 9 o’clock, but that isn’t enough sleep to run races.   So I would go back to hotel and take a nice long nap.  That means that I was sleeping twice a day for half the time.  Within a day and a half, I had lost all sense of time.  I couldn’t decide if I was hungry or tired or crazy.  I said “good morning” to people at 4:oo in the afternoon.  The problem dwarf isn’t Dopey, it’s Sleepy. (Joke courtesy of Ryan who got it from another unnamed source.)

Friday Achilles dinner:  The entire Achilles team met for a pasta dinner that night along with families and guides.  It was quite an event.  The CEO of Cigna, David Cordani, spoke words of encouragement and acknowledgement of the trials and hard work that all of the athletes had put in.  I got to meet Cedric King who did the Dopey Challenge last year on prosthesis as a double amputee above the knee.  He was a large part of why I signed up for this.  The guest of honor, however, was the Mouse himself.

So far away:  Philadelphia and Orlando are 991.5 miles apart, so you don’t expect to see people you know that you didn’t already know were going to be there.  I was lucky enough to run into one of my business partners, my best friend from college (I was riding so she took the picture rather than the two of us together) and crazy Maggie who not only ran the Dopey Challenge, she went into the parks with here children every day…

Friends on the road:  There is something that happens to your brain when you run or race for a long time.  It might be the distance, the endorphins or the loneliness, but you can build relationships that are brief but no less genuine for that.  While I was doing the marathon, I kept being passed by/passing one runner.  He was crushing it so I started calling him Crusher in my head.  A lot of runners seem to sink into their brains.  They are solely focused on how they are running, how they are feeling and how they are doing.  Not Crusher, he had an encouraging word for me every time he passed me on hill.  I got to give him a “way to go” on the down hills.  It got so that when I reached the top of a hill my goal was to catch back up to him.  Like survivors trying to make sure that their pieces of the shipwreck don’t drift too far apart.  At mile 17 heading into ESPN, we seemed to be the only people on the road.  Crusher had a support team waiting for him with snacks, beverage, a time check and a “Way to go, Kevin!”  I was like Sherlock Holmes* and figured out that his name was Kevin.  He found me at the wheeled athletes’ tent after the race and we got to congratulate each other.  He kept me going and he really did crush it.  He finished it in 2:54:02.  We may never meet again, but he was someone that helped me through.  That’s him at the mile marker and me chasing him.

Birthday Sunday:  I not only completed the Disney Marathon on my birthday, I also switched age brackets.  How does that effect my standings for the Dopey Challenge?  There are five year age brackets so that you are rated against your peers.  (I don’t really care, but I am highly amused by this.)  Sunday afternoon/evening my sweetheart and I went into Epcot.  We had a birthday dinner at the Morocco Pavillion and got out just before it got too loud for my overstimulated/undersleepinated brain.  J hates being in pictures, but said that he would be in pictures for my birthday. I forgot to take any.  So this is him peeking in the top edge of my last day medals.

Accessories:  I know that I don’t look like a particulalry threatening individual.  I fall under the category of “mostly harmless,” but I still had to get through airport securtiy with all my medals.  I didn’t want to have to take all of them off to go through the checkpoint, so I only wore my Dopey medal and packed the others in my suitcase.  For the record:  yes.  I do sit at my desk wearing all of my medals.  And,yes.  My neck does get tired.

Photo gallery:  These are just a bunch of pictures that didn’t directly apply to a section of post.

There will a final post which will be the credits and acknowledgements.  I hope you’ll stick around for that.

And I am still accepting donations, if you are interested.

*without the heroin problem

I’m not sure how to express everything I want to say about the Walt Disney Marathon Weekend. I haven’t processed everything so this post is about the races.  More will follow about the associated antics.

Wednesday Expo:  I arrived on Wednesday afternoon excited and nervous with some minor snags along the way. I got my bibs and registration packet, got my picture taken at the Expo. Then all I had to do was get to sleep. I had a 2:30a.m. wakeup call for a 6:00 a.m. start, which sounds excessive, but wheeled athletes have to be on the starting line almost an hour and a half before the actual start. If we weren’t there first, we would have to go around the 12,000 other runners in their corrals.  And despite a typo in my name, bib number 27947 was ready to roll.

Thursday 5K: It was dark and cold as we set out, but excitement and nerves were enough to keep me going.  I rode a Force G handcycle which is more high tech than my bike.  After the welcome speeches and the national anthem away we went.  And 16:30 later I crossed the finish line!  It was hard to believe that after all that work, the first race was over so quickly.  I headed back to my hotel with my first medal clutched in my greedy little paws.

Friday 10K:  This was going to be a different kettle of fish entirely.  Rain threatened and I was riding a different bike (the Force G was promised to someone else for the 10k and the half marathon).  Luckily I had gotten some running tights that matched my Philly Achilles green singlet.  Just as I headed to the starting line, the rain began.  It wasn’t a light, friendly rain.  This rain meant business.  It was going to be very wet and stay that way.  Another welcome, national anthem and away I went.  I started having technical issues with the bike within the first two miles of the race.  The parking brake was catching when I was trying to ride.  It was worst in first gear (aka Granny Gear for getting up hills) and flat out locked on me in the middle of one minor hill.  I was upset.  I knew I could do hills like that one. It shouldn’t be a problem for me at all.  I was pretty spent and was starting to doubt that I would be able to make it through another 39.3 miles.  I worked hard and made it to the finish line in what felt like a terrible 48:26..but why should I think it was terrible?  It was my first 10k ever, which means it was a Personal Record.

Saturday Half Marathon:

Sunday Full Marathon:

Last one.  Did I have it in me?  I better because it was time to go.  I had decided that my goal was to finish and that I would stop and get my picture taken with characters along the way.  I was back on the Force G handcycle, and it was dreamy.  It was strange, I seemed to be staying ahead of the pack a lot longer than I usually do…but tra la la, la la…I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing.  At the half-way mark I got a shock.  The time said 1:25:30.  What?  There was the possibility of breaking three hours?  At mile 15 I got a great punch of energy when one of my best friends appeared shouting “Patricia! Go Patricia!”  It lasted me all the way through…I finished with a 2:53:46…a personal record by more than 50 minutes!

There you have it…race memories.  I plan to post another blog concerning all the things that weren’t specifically about the races because there were plenty of those.

Thank you to all of you for the support and encouragement through this crazy journey.  It’s been amazing to push further than I thought I could go.

If you haven’t contributed to my campaign for Achilles, I would love it if you could:  Here’s your chance