Space Coast Half Marathon 2014: Challenger; November 30

Pre-race

The day after Thanksgiving, we hit the road at about 4am and drove straight down to Cocoa Beach, FL. Thank goodness that we took turns driving. We made it around 5:30pm, which was fabulous time!

On Saturday, we did packet pickup right at 9am. The race moved packet pickup from Kennedy Space Center to the Radisson at the Port at their conference center. It definitely worked better than the KSC setup, but it was still a bit crowded in the conference center. We got to meet up with a DC area friend, Valerie.

After packet pickup, we headed to Disney for the day. We still had a couple of days on the annual passes from last year, so we figured we might as well. We decided to park at EPCOT and then went straight to DHS/MGM. I had managed to snag Toy Story Mania fast passes a week before our trip. Yay!

After doing Great Movie Ride, walking around in the Animation area, watching Indiana Jones, we were sitting on a bench and I had this feeling that I needed to check email. So, I did and we got some interesting news about the cruise we were taking after the race.

We tried to "ignore" the news the best we could, rode Toy Story Mania, and then headed over to the Osbourne Festival of Lights. We only got to see about 10 minutes of the show. I could sit for hours and watch the lights! Since we had dinner reservations in EPCOT, we headed back over there to Japan. After a wonderful dinner, we (sadly) went to the car & back to Cocoa Beach. We had an EARLY wake up call the next day!

Race day
We knew that the bus filled up early last year and so we were determined to be there early again this year. The 4:15 bus was filled by 4:05 this year... and we didn't make it on it. We convinced some of the spectators to get on the 5am bus instead. I really wish they'd tell the marathoners to wait until the 5am bus so that the half marathoners (like us) weren't freaking out about not making the 5am bus and start line. We managed to get on the bus (along with a few others) & I sat on Jon's lap.

We got to the starting area & shivered for a little bit. I think next year we may check a bag just to have pre-race warm clothes.

(I'm finishing this up in April 2015, so here's the shortened version)

The start of the race was good - crowded, but good. We started our 1:1 run/walks almost immediately. Around mile 2, we both had to use the restroom. I wish we hadn't needed to because we spent almost 20 minutes in line. Ah well. From there, we continued to do 1:1 throughout the race. Because of our stop, we came in at just about 3 hrs. Not horrible for no training. Maybe one of these years we'll actually train for this race!

Post Race
We headed back to the hotel to shower & finish packing. Once done with that, we checked out, got lunch, and headed over to the Port Canaveral cruise terminals. We knew the cruise wouldn't be the one we were hoping for. The lines to get into the building were horrible. We ended up standing in line for about 3 hours. A guy in front of us passed out (that was fun). Thank goodness we ate lunch! Overall, the cruise was good. The ports we ended up stopping at held no interest for us at all, so we didn't bother getting off the boat. Turned out to be super relaxing that way!