In January of this year I ran the ‘Goofy’s Race and a Half Challenge’ at Walt Disney World.  The challenge is the completion of the Half Marathon (13.1 miles) on Saturday and the Full Marathon (26.2 miles) on the Sunday.  For good measure my wife and I also ran the Family 5K on the Friday.  That was what everyone traditionally called the unofficial ‘Dopey’ challenge.  I think the names are pretty much self explanatory.  So in addition to the 39.3 miles official distance you add another 3.1 miles to reach the 42.2 miles of the Dopey…or so we thought…

Was this a prediction for 2014?

Last week runDisney dropped a little note into the runDisney ‘Wine and Dine’ registration email that the upcoming (2014) Walt Disney World Marathon weekend would see all new medals for the races.  I’d seen rumors rumbling around on Facebook and the blogosphere earlier this week that Disney was planning on hosting an official ‘Dopey’ challenge.  There were lots of wild guesses out there as to what would make up the Dopey.  Most thought that it would be what everyone had been unofficially doing all these years but what confused everyone was that it seemed runDisney had slipped a 10K into the Marathon weekend schedule.  Well today all those rumors were put to rest as runDisney announced the official inaugural ‘Dopey Challenge’.  This consists of 4 races on 4 days as follows:

• Thursday January 9 – 5K (3.1 miles)
• Friday January 10 – 10K (6.2 miles)
• Saturday January 11 – Half Marathon (13.1 miles)
• Sunday January 12 – Full Marathon (26.2 miles)

The Goofy Challenge earns you a Donald medal for the Half, a Mickey medal for the Full and a Goofy medal for completing both, a total of 3 medals.  Add in one more for the 5K and you walk away (slowly and with a limp probably) with 4 medals.  runDisney announced that by completing the Dopey Challenge you get the 5K medal, a Minnie themed medal for the 10K as well as the Donald, Mickey and Goofy and finally for completing all races you earn a new ‘Dopey’ medal.  That’s 6, count them, 6 medals.  Bling, bling, bling, bling, bling, bling (although the 5K is usually a rubber medallion so deduct a bling…it’s up to you).  That’s some serious hardware.  In addition to walking funny after all this mileage you’ll probably be stooped over from the weight around you neck 🙂

So, what’s the plan?  Am I in?  You bet.  Wouldn’t miss this.  A friend suggested I need an intervention.  Maybe, but it will have to wait until January 13, 2014!!!

Thanks to runDisney I now have 2 problems:

1. My blog is called Philly2Goofy (oops, didn’t see this coming)
2. I’m going to need a bigger car for my new distance magnet (see below)

My car

Race you to the Castle 🙂

It’s official