Just after this year’s Walt Disney World Marathon weekend in January, Disney announced some of the details of next year’s event – one of which was a new race – the Marathon Relay. A marathon without having to run a full 26.2 miles? Isn’t THAT an intriguing idea! It was a little frustrating, though because up until this week there hadn’t really been any additional details on it. But finally, just a day or so before registration opened up on Tuesday, there was some additional information on the web site, and even more has been released since then. Here’s the press release.

In the new relay, two-person teams will each race 13.1 miles (each completing their own half marathon). The first leg goes from Epcot to Magic Kingdom and ends in the Pluto parking lot. The second leg goes from there to Animal Kingdom, the Studios, and Epcot, and ends in the Epcot parking lot. It will be run at the same time as the WDW Marathon on January 8, 2012 and will share most of the course with those who are running the Marathon, with some slight differences because of the relay aspect and exchange zone.

Those mischievous chipmunks, Chip and Dale, are the hosts for this race, and will be featured on the new relay medals. It will be fun to see what the medals look like! I hope they are not responsible for the aid stations, though – I’d prefer something other than acorns. 🙂

The web site says that “registration is limited” – though it doesn’t say how limited. I didn’t take any chances, and I signed up (Lee and I will be running as Team Zimmerbreath) as soon as registration opened on Tuesday morning. 🙂

I love running in Inaugural events – this will be my 4th Inaugural Disney race. I’ve also done the Inaugurals of the Disneyland Half Marathon, the Tower of Terror 13K and the Princess Half Marathon. It will be interesting to see how some of the logistics work, though, and I hope there won’t be too many first year glitches – that’s probably one reason they are keeping it somewhat smaller. I know I have lots of questions on how things are going to work – like how they will transport those of us running the second leg to our start area, and if we’ll have any way of tracking our partner to know where they are and when we might expect them to arrive – and then how do we find them to do the “exchange”? And then there’s the transportation or runner1 back to Epcot, and whether Lee will be able to monitor my progress, and how we find each other at the finish. Not to mention how we all amuse ourselves while waiting at least a couple of hours for our partner to finish their leg of the race! I’ll be running leg 2 – it’s bad enough to have to get up insanely early for the start of the marathon, but it looks like I’ll have to get up insanely early and then wait for Lee to arrive at the exchange. And then he’ll have to wait for me at the finish – and since he runs faster he’ll have a longer wait than I will. 🙂 Hopefully all of these questions will be answered before the race – but if not, we’ll definitely find out on January 8, 2012!

Now that we’ve figured out what Disney race we’re running in January, Lee and I are also happy to be returning to Team AllEars again this year. We’ll be Running with Purpose along with our co-team captains Michelle Scribner MacLean and Mike Scopa, the incomparable Deb Wills, and the rest of our wonderful teammates. We’ll all be doing our best to raise awareness and support breast cancer research. You can read more about Team AllEars HERE.

If you’ve ever thought about running a race during Disney’s Marathon Weekend this is a great opportunity to do it. It doesn’t matter if you’ve never run before – every year the team has people new to running who work and train and then are able to complete their first 5K or half marathon during Marathon Weekend! Everyone on the team is so supportive and encouraging – it makes a big difference in all of those months of training since even those of us who are experienced runners have our ups and downs, too.

Team AllEars is dedicated to raising funds to support breast cancer research. We’re not quite ready to start with the on-line fund raising yet, but when we are I will be posting information here, and I hope that you will all consider supporting Team Zimmerbreath as we participate in the first Walt Disney World Marathon Relay!.