August 7, 2025

Running has been a bit of a struggle for me this summer. My longest run was seven miles. I most frequently run only three to four miles. A five-mile run (which I did this morning) is a long run for me these days.

My last big race, the Walt Disney World Marathon, (in January of this year) came as the last leg of the Dopey Challenge, a series of four races, each a bit longer than the one previous, over four days. (A 5k, followed by a 10k, followed by a half-marathon, followed by the full marathon – 48.6 miles in total.)

That marathon, the 27th of my “career,” was the last marathon I’ll ever run.

Following the race, I took some time off to let my body recover a bit and to get treatment on my left Achilles tendon (which still isn’t 100%). I’ve been running regularly since late May, but my runs have been slow and mostly uninspired.*

(*Except for a special week where I had the opportunity to run with each of my three sons – three great runs in three different states. That was awesome!)

My runs this summer have been mostly plodding. If I reach four miles, I’m usually amazed, and then discouraged because that distance often proves to be the best I can do. The killer instinct to push through the pain and misery and tediousness to keep going further is not present and I stop knowing that the longer walk home will be more miserable and tedious than the run would have been. And yet, time after time, I stop.

If one were to look at my race history, they might wonder if it was the Dopey Challenge that broke me. Was that series of races that pushed me so far past my breaking point that I’ll never truly bounce back?

I have thought about this myself on my runs (and at other times as well), “Did the Dopey break me?”

I have come to the conclusion that it did not. In fact, the more I consider it all, it was actually the anticipation of the Dopey that kept me going.

I was pretty much broken as a marathoner a few years before I did the Dopey. I had hit my peak mentally and physically. I then went way beyond that. And yet, I didn’t quit running the races. I trained, as best as I could, and pushed through the marathons, as best as I could. I did this because I knew I had one more big challenge I needed to get through. Every since I heard about the Dopey Challenge, it was something I felt I needed to do. And as a result, I pressed on and pushed my body further and further, through Achilles surgery, through the recovery, through long training periods, and long training runs, and more races on and on and on.

When I started running marathons, I never figured the sport would be something that would be part of my life for a quarter of a century.

I remember talking to my wife Laurie about running my first WDW Marathon. At that point, I had run four marathons. I didn’t know how many more races I had in me, but I hoped that the Disney World Marathon would be one of them. And it was. I ran my first Disney in 2006.

It was at that time that I learned about a ridiculous race opportunity they had called the Goofy Race and a Half Challenge – running a half-marathon and a full marathon over two days. I determined to do the Goofy, and completed those races in 2010. It was a short while later, that Disney came up with the Dopey Challenge. Well, I knew I had to do that as well.

So I did.

But in order to get there, I had to keep running, keep pushing, keep completing races, until I could schedule and plan for the Dopey, which finally came in 2025.

As I have shared, as woke up in the early morning hours and prepared for the final leg of the Dopey, the WDW Marathon, I knew that would be the last time I’d ever run 26.2 miles. I knew I had reached the end. I knew I had just one last mountain to climb. And I did it.

The Dopey didn’t break me. On the surface, since my last marathon was the last portion of that experience, it seems it might have, but if not for the Dopey, I would have quit marathons many years earlier.

I’ll always keep running, even if I’m much slower and my runs are more plodding than ever. I need to be out there and seeing what I’m capable of. I’m just not running marathons any longer. And it’s all good. My body appreciates this, of that I’m sure.

No, the Dopey didn’t break me as a marathoner. It’s quite the opposite. It was the Dopey that kept me going.