Hello everyone, and welcome to a special post that I’m sharing with you over at the Magical Blogorail!  This year, the Magical Blogorail is starting a new weekly hop called “Riding the Rails”.  This week, we are talking about the runDisney series of marathons and other races.  I thought I would talk with you about one of my long term goals — to participate in a Disney 5K race.

I have had several friends that have participated in a runDisney event — chances are you’ll see many of their posts when you go to this week’s post — but as for me, I’ve never done one, so this is a pretty new concept for me.

I have run local 5K races before, so I think I would be fine doing one at Disney, but I do need to start training.  It has been several years since I did a 5K, and I am out of shape, so for me, this will be a great motivator to not only check off one of my goals, but even get into better shape!

A cursory glance at a Google search finds many links towards apps that you can use for training.  I actually have several of them.  One that I like is the map program we use for walking our dog Regan.  It’s called Map My Dog Walk, and they have many flavors of the same app.  It’s free, and is a neat little app.  Another app I have downloaded but not used is the C25K — which stands for “Couch to 5K” and it actually gives you training regiments to turn you from a couch potato (much like me) into a person able to complete a 5K!  On the iTunes site it says that it costs $1.99, although I don’t remember paying for it, and some of my friends have used it successfully.

Of course, over at the runDisney website the training coordinator for the series is Jeff Galloway, a well known endurance runner.  He has been promoting a system of running called the run-walk-run method, and the idea is that you will get better and be able to complete more distances by running some, then walking some, and then running some, and so on, and so on.

If you do want to participate in a runDisney event, I’ve heard that they do enforce a 16 minute/mile pace.  I believe that they may have relaxed that requirement for the 5K races, but I’m not 100% certain.  If you do participate in a race, and complete it, you will receive a great race medal for your efforts!  They are always changing them out, but they are really neat.  If you would like to read about a friend of mine that did a half marathon at Walt Disney World, click on the link and give it a read.  In the meantime, though, please click on the image below to read the rest of the entries, and thanks for stopping by!  Good luck on your race training!