You might think that the point of running the Dopey challenge is the bling. Especially when the bling is as sweet as this. The picture above is my favorite photo of all those that I took during the races.
And if the Dopey Challenge is about the bling, there is plenty of it. If you finish all four races, you get three medals on marathon day--the marathon medal, the Goofy Challenge medal (because the Goofy challenge is completing the half and the full), and the Dopey Challenge medal.
So if you are keeping track, that's a total of six medals for completing four races. And this year the medals were pretty darn sweet.
A fellow Dopey Challenge participant captured this picture in the park the day after. Because it was the 25th year for the marathon, we were all given a special set of ears as a surprise. Pretty sweet.
And finally getting to have a beer at Disney Springs and celebrate with my mom after all was said and done was pretty sweet. But none of these pictures really capture the point of running Dopey.
On any given day if you ask me "Why?", I'll give you one of a hundred answers. Sometimes platitudes: There will come a day when I cannot run. But today is not that day. So I run.
And we must do the things we think we cannot do. (So said Eleanor Roosevelt.)
I put 15+ months of work into preparing for this race series, and I'm actually convinced that THAT was what it was about. It was about the prep. And grinding out the miles even when I didn't want to. And I often didn't want to. In order to run 48.6, I ran 1300+ miles of preparation. Today, that's what it's about. Ask me again tomorrow, though. Tomorrow, I do my first run post-Dopey challenge.
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