Monday Motivation – Bucket List Race Challenges

A week and a half ago, I went back in time 10+ years ago and reflected on how far I’ve gotten since then. In that same post, I briefly mentioned that I had a plan for the future. Since it’s motivational monday, I thought today would be an appropriate time to tell you about them.

Awhile back, I wrote about my Half Marathon Bucket List. It was a list of 8 races that I had either already done or wanted to do sometime in my life. Well, I will have completed 5 of them by the end of this year so why not add a few more to the list? I’m only in my late 20s. I have a lot more races to run. 🙂 Without further ado, a few more additions to that list:

The Abbott World Marathon Majors (WMM)- I read about this on a fellow blogger’s page and even though I hadn’t even run my first WMM race (NYC marathon), I knew I wanted to complete this challenge. The WMM consists of six races – New York City, Chicago, Boston, London, Berlin, and Tokyo. All of the races except for Boston have lottery entries, which make them fairly difficult to get in and even if you did get into all of them, running the Boston marathon requires a speedy qualifying time. At my current age, I would need to run a marathon time of 3 hrs 35 min. That’s a 8:12 min/mile pace. Holy crap. If you remember, I ran the NYC marathon in 4 hrs 48 min. That means I would have to shave off over an hour of my time to qualify. That’s insane! Luckily, there are other ways of entering these races (i.e. charities, tour companies, etc) and Charlotte over at The Runner Beans does a very good job at highlighting them.

So why do I want to finish this particular series? Well, I do like to shoot for the stars when it comes to goals and also, the medal is amazing.

The Six Star Finisher Medal

If you manage to run all 6 races, you get the lovely six star finisher medal. There doesn’t appear to be a time limit so my hope is to enter a few lotteries each year and hope I get into at least one a year. New York City has already been crossed off and I’m running Chicago this year. Woohoo. That means I’ll have 4 more to go. I’ll be entering the lottery for the 2018 Berlin race this year and hopefully, I’ll be able to get in. *Fingers crossed.* Boston will definitely be last on my list. I’m going to try time qualifying and I’m sure the training will take years. Who knows? If I stay at my current pace, I can qualify at age 69. LOL. I’m hoping it won’t take that long, but you never know.

The Dopey challenge – This challenge is aptly named. You run a 5k on Thursday, a 10k on Friday, a half marathon on Saturday, and a full marathon on Sunday. That’s 48.6 miles in four days. On average, I log about 20-25 miles in seven days. LOL. Okay, I admit I may have gone off the deep end with wanting to do this challenge, but hear me out. Last month, DisneyWorld had their marathon weekend. The running community on Twitter blew up my feed with pictures of people having a blast at DisneyWorld and I’ve always loved Disney related things. LOL. So the idea of running the Dopey Challenge kind of just got seeded into my brain. I obviously wouldn’t be running for time. That’d be crazy. I’d take photos with all the characters and get my fill of Disney. The marathon distance even allows runners to ride the Mt. Everest rollercoaster midway through the marathon. LOL. How cool is that?

Credit to 40 bibs for this fabulous photo of her medals.

For finishing the Dopey challenge, you get six medals – one medal for each race, a medal for the Goofy challenge, and a medal for the Dopey challenge.Registration for these races open up next week and it’ll be their 25th anniversary (5th anniversary for the Dopey Challenge). I’ll probably be signing up unless someone talks some sense into me. 😛

So there you have it, my new additions to the bucket list. I can’t wait to run them all!

What races are you looking forward to? Have you completed one of these races? How did it go?