The Inaugural Tinker Bell Half Marathon Weekend took place at Disneyland January 27-29. The Health and Fitness Expo was on Friday and Saturday, the Never Land Family Fun Run 5K was Friday night, the kids’ races were Saturday morning, and the Tinker Bell Half Marathon was Sunday morning, starting at 5:45.

I’ll have more on my thoughts about the race and various aspects later – for now I just want to share a little bit about our experience.

Lee and I approached this one a little differently, and decided we were going to have fun with it. So we did something we’d never done before, and ran in costume – both of us with sparkly running skirts and pixie wings. (I also had a rainbow tutu – couldn’t convince Lee he needed one of those, too, but we saw a couple of guys out on the course wearing skirts and tutus, and I think he felt a little envious then!)

So, what do you need to run the Tinker Bell Half Marathon? Tutu, sparkly running skirt, wings, race shirt, and race bib, of course!

And it also helps to have a supportive husband with a sense of humor. 🙂

It was a great day for racing – temperature was cool in the morning while we were waiting but not cold (about 50), and even after the sun came up it wasn’t hot, though it did warm up quite a bit.

In Disneyland the lines were very long for the characters, so we didn’t stop most of the time – just a couple of pictures.

Lee could have run faster, but he stayed with me – I didn’t have quite as good a run as I did at the Marathon Relay three weeks ago, and we finished in 2:35:34, and for the most part we had a good time. The costume thing was really no problem at all – I may run in a tutu every (Disney) race from now on. 🙂

We heard and saw some fun comments on the course – in Disneyland, one of the pirates said something like: “All of you fairies – if you got wings, why are you running?” And we saw a couple of signs that made us laugh – in Downtown Disney was “Worst Parade Ever”. and at about Mile 5 was: “Your feet hurt because you’re kickin’ butt.” In Disneyland someone had a sign that said: “This race is expensive, you need to finish it.”

This afternoon we met up with our fellow Team AllEars members who were here to run the race, and we all went to Pixie Hollow to get our photo taken with Tinker Bell, since we had run her race today. Lots of fun! (And we all earned Coast-to-Coast medals today, too!)

It’s been a great weekend.