Running Down the Dream: Zip-a-dee-do-dah: Vacation Days 1 & 2

My family's big summer vacation was a trip to Orlando from June 7-15! I trained during the trip, because I love running on vacation, but my mileage was relatively light (59.2 miles total in 9 runs over 9 days) and I didn't have any structured workouts. Here is the first post in my series of day-by-day re-caps of my runs and our activities.

June 7 - Travel day
Run:
Before embarking on our journey, I did 8.1 miles (6:58), including pacing my friend Amy R. on 3 x 1 mile repeats with half mile recoveries. She told me that I'd be pacing at 6:35-6:40, which was the main reason I agreed to do this on a scheduled base run day, but she was so strong she wouldn't let me hold her back, and the repeats were 6:24, 6:17, 6:15 (on rep 3 I gave in and pushed her for a strong finish). Those paces were brisk for me, but not too bad; certainly easier than at Dam to Dam! I was feeling pretty down about running -- I didn't even want to run this day -- but Amy cheered me up and helped me get onto moving on from my disappointing half time.

Activities:

This was a travel day. We left home around 8:00 a.m. and drove to my parents' house near Wichita, where we had a short visit and lunch. My dad then drove us to the airport where we met my brother-in-law Thomas and his kids Christopher and Samantha. Albani loved sitting between her cousins on the plane and looking out the window. Our flight was delayed a bit, so it was after 9:00 pm when we arrived in Florida. We picked up our rental van, drove to our hotel, and got dinner from a nearby grocery store or Taco Bell before going to bed after midnight (i.e., very late for me and Albani!).

Flight delays didn't faze these two

Grandpa dropping us off

#1 father

June 8 - Epcot
Run:
I exited my hotel to run into a torrential downpour, but it was run then or not at all, so of course I ran. My main hesitancy was that I only had one pair of running shoes and knew they wouldn't dry out in 24 hours, which they didn't. I was soaked to the core within minutes, and it was a bit tricky figuring out a course in an unfamiliar area when it was dark and stormy, but I stumbled upon a decent route. I had 5 base miles that ended up being 5.8 miles at 7:29 average pace. I definitely felt the travel and sleep-deprivation on this one, but I also expected all of my vacation runs to be slower than usual and had no problem with that. When I uploaded my run, I saw that I'd run four Strava segments during the run, at my easy pace I was third to fifth overall female on them, and a sub-7:00 effort would easily take them, so I decided I'd get them the next day...so began my Orlando Strava segment-chasing!

Activities:
We decided to go to Epcot for our first park, hoping that we could do activities indoors if it was raining; the forecast showed rain every day we were in Florida. We started with our first of many hotel breakfasts, which was much better this day than on day 7! We left our hotel on the 8:30 a.m. shuttle and returned on the 8:00 pm shuttle. We went pretty much non-stop at Epcot, and rode pretty much every ride in the park (except for a driving ride with a nearly 3-hour wait). We did FastPasses for Spaceship Earth, Soarin', and Living off the Land. Albani loved Spaceship Earth, and we ended up going on it twice. We got rained on a bit, but managed to stay inside eating lunch for the worst of it.