Disneyland Star Wars Light Side Jan 2017: Day 4

Sunday January 15th:
3:15am alarm went off. We left our room just after 4:30am. We were in Corral G and had a long walk to get there. We met Deedee and Henry in our Corral. We chatted until it was time to move up to the start line. The race officially started at 5:30am. Our corral started close to 6am. Ryan and Henry worked their way to the front of our corral because they both wanted to get good finish times. Deedee and I stayed about at the middle. But we were all going to run our own races. There were lots of photo opps on the course. I didn’t stop for characters because the lines looked to be a good 20+ minute wait. But I did see BB8 in front of Star Tours as I ran by! Chewbacca was on Main Street. Lots of others throughout the parks. It was a touch course because it was long, straight and flat. We ran nearly 2.5 miles straight, without a curve or turn in the road. The mile markers seemed to take forever for me at this race. The 501st Star Wars Group was out in a small group around mile 8-9. They had a BB8 and R2D2 there. But I didn’t see them until I had already ran past them. I didn’t want to have to try to loop back. I was a bit disappointment because they usually have a huge group. Well, within a mile down the road, the HUGE group was there! So many awesome costumes for so many characters from Star Wars! I got TFL pain in my hip and knee around mile 10 after a lady dead stopped in front of me and I had to take evasive action to not run into her at the beginning of the section with the 501st members. Since I was starting to get pain and tightness, I didn’t stop for pics and am bummed about that. But I just needed to finish at this point. Ryan was able to stop for pics and got a great one with R2D2! I was keeping a pretty good pace up until that point. My last 3 miles were slow and I was way off pace with a finish of 2 hours 56 minutes. I stopped at the med station to get ice on my knees immediately. Ryan finished in 2 hours 9 minutes. Henry finished just under 2 hours. Deedee was around a 2 hour 35 minute finish. This was probably my second slowest finish times of my 6 half marathons I’ve done. But it was still fun. After the finish, they had an AP tent and we got free AP bags and a special photo opp. We then went and took pics at the Hoth scene and Compactor scenes. Each had about a 15 minute wait. We took our time and enjoyed the finish area and taking finishing pics. Since we had to leave the finish area and enter Downtown Disney, we had to go through security. Problem was that everyone was trying to leave. So it took at least 20 minutes to get through. We popped out through the next security enter/exit at the top end of Downtown Disney. This meant we were walking by the last stretch of the race. Well, we had the opportunity to see the final finishers coming in! We cheered so loudly for them! You could see they were hurting and struggling so bad and the bike patrol was right on their heels! But they were just about to finish! We were back to our room by 11am, showered and out the door by noon.

We always forget to ride the monorail at Disneyland, so we decided we would enter Disneyland via the monorail. You board in Downtown Disney. Well, this was a big mistake because we didn’t realize how long the line was upstairs. We ended up waiting about 30 minutes and for at least 3 monorails to come. We arrived near Tomorrowland and saw that Space was down (so no FP distribution). We then grabbed Indiana Jones FP’s for 3:40pm return time. We then got lunch at French Market. It was busy and were lined up outside. I had roasted chicken with veggies and Ryan had a French Dip with homemade chips. Both were so good! The crowds were insanely high, it was wall to wall people. So we just planned to take it easy for the day. We walked to Starbucks and grabbed some go go juice. We sat and sipped them on a bench in Frontierland. While there, I chatted on the phone with my 12 year old niece for about 20 minutes. We saw the Disneyland band come through twice too! We then got pics at the castle with our medals. Then over to watch Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln since we hadn’t watched it in years. It was 4:10pm so we went and used our FP’s for Indiana Jones. We swapped places with a young girl and her dad so that she could sit behind the wheel of our jeep and “drive”. She was so happy!

We then went over to Critter Country to try to meet Pooh and friends, but they had just closed off the line. So we rode the Pooh ride with a 10 minute wait. We then grabbed Thunder FP’s for 7:30pm. We then rose Snow White with a 20 minute wait. It was dinner time and we were hungry. We wanted to eat at the Plaza again but the line was crazy long. So we opted for hot dogs at Casey’s. We then walked some shops. We grabbed hot chocolate at Starbucks (it was chilly every day of our trip). After sipping our drinks, it was 7:30 and time for our Thunder FP’s. So fun at night! We walked the Main Street shops on our way out. We went to World of Disney and picked up a Vinylmation. Then to DStreet for another one. We picked up Wetzel’s pretzels and took that back to our room. We were in our room by 8:45pm, ate our pretzels, stretched our legs and had lights out by 10pm. I’m surprised we were awake that late!
Miles Logged 23.7 (13.1 of which were the half marathon).