Day 1 - Port Canaveral
Day 2 - Nassau
Day 3 - Castaway Cay (Disney's private island)
Day 4 - At Sea
Day 5 - Port Canaveral
I'd never been on any kind of cruise and I'd been dreaming of going on a Disney cruise for over 15 years. Despite all that excitement I was really nervous about how I'd find it. So when I start getting nervous about something I tend to research the hell out of it. By the time I set foot on the ship I knew exactly what to expect about everything which in some cases was a good thing but I digress.
While researching I came across activities that you can do while at Castaway Cay. For most people, a day at Castaway Cay involves lying on the beach all day an activity I loathe. I can't imagine anything more boring so I started looking at the other stuff you can do and came across the Castaway Cay 5K. Now at around the same time some friends of mine had started taking up running and we're doing Color Runs and Half Marathons and the like. I don't know what switch flipped in my head but I decided that I was going to do the Castaway Cay 5K. In part it was probably that it wasn't actually going to cost me anything extra to do so if it all went tits up I wouldn't have incurred any significant financial expense. I came up with a training plan and my only really goals were to finish and to try to run the whole thing.
About 1 month into training disaster struck and I managed to injure myself. Now being 250lbs you might think that I injured myself while running. No, I picked a T-shirt up from the floor and felt something go in my back. Putting the pain aside things did not feel good so I pulled back almost entirely from the training but still with the determination to do the 5K as planned.
I started reading people's running blogs, learning every part of the 5K and its challenges. If I couldn't physically prepare I would most definitely be mentally prepared. One of the blogs I came across was The Fat Runner and out of all the ones I've read it's probably been the one that connected with me the most, because, like me, this guy, for no apparent reason at all, woke up one morning and decided that running the Castaway Cay 5K was a good idea.
I will recap the cruise and the 5K later on but what followed was me doing another 5K and then running being put on the back burner for a year. That is until now...
This past year I've seen 2 cousins both complete a half marathon and several people I know complete the London Marathon. Last week someone at work came up with the idea of a large group of us doing the local Half Marathon in October. After last year I did walk away thinking that I would love to complete a Half Marathon and a Marathon just to be able to say I did it and since the last 6 months has been a bit of a whirlwind now seems as good a time as any to give it a try. Sorry there is no try. Now seems as good a time as any to do it.
