Woo-Hoo!!!

This entry will appropriately be "marathon" in length, as I have so many fun things to report about this past week! I have been putting off this entry because I knew how long it would take and today I finally stopped procrastinating. Here goes...

My teammates and I left in the early morning on Friday the 11th and arrived at our Disney resort in time to pick up our race packets. (Here is a picture of Angela and I at the expo.) After we left the expo, we headed to our team meeting -which was like a giant pep talk-and served to remind us of the reason that we all embarked on this journey in the first place. It was a real tear jerker and I can say that there wasn't a dry eye in the room.

After the meeting we all went back to our rooms and got ready for the TNT pasta party. This too was amazing! We were transported on buses to Epcot center where we were brought in to the park from an access road. As we turned the corner to walk into the banquet hall both sides of the walkway were lined with nearly a hundred mentors, coaches, team captains and TNT staff cheering at the top of their lungs for us, the runners. I will have a hard time describing the exact scene but believe me when I say that it was powerful and we all felt like rock stars.

During the entire dinner there were screens which scrolled through every team hero across the country - both the honored team heroes and heroes in memory were recognized. Several people at my table couldn't stop the tears from falling as we saw the "in memory of" slides.

We also heard from a national TNT representative and heard what we'd all been waiting to hear --- that the 1,900 TNT runners raised 5.6 million dollars for The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society from this race alone! How amazing is that!!

By this point in the trip I had a major headache (no doubt from all of the crying) so we went back to the resort where I met the family (who had just arrived from their 8 hour drive) and we all promptly went to sleep. The next morning we were up bright and early at 5:30 am so that we could head to the park and cheer on our teammates that were running the half marathon. They were amazing and inspiring and I am so proud of them! Here is a picture a few of our closest friends at mile 8 on their run. They were so excited to see Kate standing on the side of the road cheering them on.

After a celebratory/carbo load dinner on Saturday night I tried to get to sleep early. I had to do this because we had to be up at 2 am in order to catch the 3am bus to Disney. Is that crazy or what? Disney makes the teams be on site by 4am so that we can be ushered to the start line in an orderly fashion. By the time 6am rolled around we were pumped and ready to get the show on the road!

Here is a shot of my teammate, Maria, and I running in the race. You can tell both by the darkness and our smiles that we had only gone 4 miles so far! There were 18,000 runners in a relatively small area so it was kind of frustrating to not ever be able to spread out and get our groove. We averaged a 12 minute mile for the first 4 miles because there were so many people everywhere!

One of my best friends, Sue and her husband Chris, popped in and ran with us from miles 13-17. That was an awesome time to have some new company and to have another person to do all of the talking for us! This picture was taken at mile 13 and although we were still feeling good, Miss Kate wasn't -as you can tell from this picture. (Don't worry, after the marathon we all took a nice long nap and she was up and at 'em for the victory party.)

About mile 21 I started to feel pretty tired but never once felt like I wouldn't make it. I don't remember much of those last 2 miles because I just kept thinking about how glad I would be to stop running :)

My friends had arranged to pass Kate off to me at the finish line and despite the serious threats from the Disney staff, they did it and Kate, Maria and I ran the last 100 yards of the race together. I thought I'd start bawling when we finished but I don't think I had the energy for that in that moment.

The finish line was a zoo and by the time I found Jason I was ready for a good cry though. I felt so lucky to be surrounded by my parents, the Hatches, Maria and her family, Kristine, Angela, Whitney and all of our TNT friends and supporters. It was overwhelming but wonderful!

Holy smokes, that was a novel in and of itself and I haven't even gotten to the victory party which may have even been better than the marathon! I'll get to that tomorrow...