Our road to Goofy, part 1.

Posted by Jeremy Peck:

Part 2  Part 3

Let me start by saying that I never really intended to do the Goofy.  I started looking just to do the Disney World Marathon, and wasn’t really sure if our family could make it happen since it falls on the weekend just after school goes back into session.  This was back in late fall as I was about to run the Memphis Half with David Drennan, Nick Fogleman, Amy Dolbeare, Steve & Jenn Canny and Albert Piercall.  I was trying to figure out what races I’d like to try after finishing the Memphis Half.  I have run 3 previous marathons (Memphis, Chicago, St. Louis) so I’m always looking for a new experience and am not new to the distance.  I mentioned the Goofy to this group and that it would be cool to try it sometime.  Somehow or another Nick, Dave and Amy said they would do it.  Dave has also run several marathons, but Nick and Amy had not.  

After finishing the race and recovering, my family started discussing it and we decided that we would be able to pull it off.  I researched it and found that registration opened in January after the 2009 race.  In January I fired off an email to the other 3 asking if they were really in for it, reminding them that registration opened soon and that it fills up quickly.  I think they had written it off since we hadn’t really talked about it anymore.  I however was excited about the challenge and was going to do it regardless of what they decided.  The first week registration was open we signed up and paid our steep fee (more that the combined registration of the 2 races).

We kind of let it go the rest of the year.  We all had slightly different agendas and races we wanted to run.  I was still trying to get back to my previous speed after an extended time off in early 2008.  We discussed our training plans and when we would start in earnest and we all agreed that it would have to be a lot of consecutive day running with dual runs on the weekend.  We met up periodically over the summer for training runs but didn’t really finalize anything until August.  I had done some research on training plans but couldn’t really find very many for Goofy.  The plan calculators don’t really include anything for back to back races.  Dave however sat down and figured out a rough plan that he marked on a calendar.  Once Abe’s Amble was done in August we all started training hard following Dave’s plan.  I had been following an advanced plan for Abe’s obtained from the Runner’s World website and it transitioned very smoothly into Dave’s, at least it seemed at the start.


Part 2  Part 3