Free… for the mere price of a cruise!

Last summer my family and I took a week cruise on the Disney Magic. I’d heard about the Castaway Cay 5k for months prior and on Tuesday, June 26th 2012, I got to experience it firsthand.

Disney owns its very own Bahamian island, Castaway Cay and it’s absolutely beautiful. However, that day, Tropical Storm Debby was brewing and decided to take aim.  I, along with the other runners (I’d guess there were about 35 of us), got hit about ten minutes into our run.

The group of us met in one of the bars at 8:30ish and got our bib numbers.  You could tell that everyone was sizing each other up until we all realized that we were just doing this for kicks.  (Or at least I was… I don’t really know what the other people were doing it for.  The plastic medal?  The glory?)

The sun was still shining at this point but if you look off in the distance, you can see the clouds rolling in.

My plan for this 5k was to take it nice and easy and take pictures along the route.  That lasted for those first ten minutes.  We took a tram out to the start of the 5k; Everyone was in good spirits and chatty the entire ride.

Soon after I took this picture, the skies above looked ominous.  Dark clouds came barreling toward us and started pelting us with hail.  That was about the time I decided to stash my phone in my SPIbelt and press on.  The route isn’t all that exciting anyway; past the watch tower, out and back near the airstrip, the watch tower loop AGAIN, and then the finish.

I fried the backlight in my nano.  Boo!  Wound up finishing in about 35 minutes (that’s with stops along the way).  Made friends with the kid running near me, we played cat and mouse the entire run.  And at the end I joined a woman that was ahead of me and we finished up together.  She was training for that year’s Tower of Terror 10 miler.

I have to admit, I felt pretty bad ass running in HAIL.  I mean, yes, I ruined my nano and I was soaked to the bone… but hey, now I can say that I’ve experienced that, right?  Who’s drinking from the half full glass?  That would be me!

You might not be able to tell from the picture but I was soaked, head to toe!

A few nights later I came back to my stateroom to find a “magical moment” certificate (with my name spelled incorrectly – Womp! My parents had to go the different route with it and I’m “paying” for it ever since).

Have you ever ran in the Bahamas or any other island? In hail or a Tropical Storm? Have you broken an electronic device during a run? (I’m still bummed about that, nearly a year later.)