JoJo's Journey from Miami Marathon to Ironman USA (Lake Placid) 2010 by sjlinley

First and foremost - I ran a PB of 4:50:18 which was 9 minutes faster than my previous PB!

Second - it was bloody freezing!  The temp at the start of the race on Sunday at 5:40 am (WTF???  do we really need to start in the middle of the night??) was a balmy 26 degrees or -2.  The only saving grace was that the rain of Saturday had passed, so the skies were clear but that didn't make any difference - the wind kept the temps under 32 for hours.

Anyway, we arrived without much time to spare and piled on the garbage bags, peeled off the sweatpants, and dropped off the bags before heading to the port-a-loos.  We got out and started heading to the start, trying to incorporate an active warmup into our jog to the corral, but then the cannon went off and we saw fireworks, and we were still 1/2 mile away!  So we jogged up to the corral, ran right through it and across the starting line, and I've never run the first 3 miles of any Disney race with such ease - there was no one around us!  Eventually, the blue start met up with the red start, and the 2nd wave of starters gradually caught up so that we were in one great mass - much more familiar.  I maintained a steady pace with regular walk breaks for the first 14 miles, then I started running more just because it was too hard to stop and restart.  I bumped up against the wall at 20 miles, but hit it at 24.  The last 2 miles were like 6 miles and I was struggling.  But it was worth it to cross the line with a 4:something on the clock!

And as for how cold it was...I wore 5 layers on top, a fleece hat, gloves, a neck warmer, and garbage bags on my top and as a skirt.  I still sweated, but my hair got soaked and froze in an icicle with my headphone cords tangled in the icy-pop!  The water froze solid in the cups so we had to crush them to try to drink; the Powerade froze to slushees - even more unappealing!  The water stops were slick with ice from spilled drinks and lethal to run through - people were skating everywhere.  I seriously considered tackling a man on Main Street in the Magic Kingdom who was holding his coffee cup a little too close to the runners!  But I can honestly look back and say that I survived the 2010 Disney Marathon!

Now on to recovery for 2 weeks and then IM training starts.