On Friday, October 1, 2010, I was included in the randomly selected group of 20 runners to meet up and run with Jeff Galloway at Epcot. We were told to meet at the front of Epcot. I had a rental car for this trip, so I drove myself to the meetup. It was still dark when I arrived.
Upon entering Epcot, we were all given a black RunDisney shirt to put on! I wasted a lot of time trying to decide what to wear 🙂
RunDisney, I have four words for you – Women’s. Cut. Tech. Shirts! Please! This shirt and the race shirts are like dresses on me. I need shirts that don’t come to my knees!
Jeff and some of the Disney people talked to us a bit before we started out.
Jeff said he’d be using 2 minute run/30 second walk intervals. Although the application said runners needed to be able to keep a 12 minute/mile pace, I’m pretty sure no one told Jeff. He was running somewhere around 8-8:30 and was overall moving around 10:15-10:30 minutes/mile. It was just too fast for me to keep up, and I really didn’t want to go all out since I had 13.1 miles ahead of me the next night. So, I was in my usual spot at the back of the pack, camera in hand, snapping away at Epcot getting ready for the opening of Food & Wine Festival. I eventually gave up on the run/walk system and just made my way through the two laps we did around World Showcase.
As we passed the Fountain of Nations, we ran in to someone else who was ready to join in!
We stopped at the front of World Showcase to pose for a picture. My Canon S3 was the “fancy” camera of the bunch, most were iPhones!
After we made it back to the front of Epcot, Jeff answered questions, posed for pictures, and gave us all an autographed photo of himself in front of the castle.
He was extremely gracious and friendly to all of us! As 9 AM approached, we all had to make our way out of the park, but I think all of us were very grateful for the special RunDisney Meetup experience!