The Castle Run Podcast, Episode 1: How I Came to Be the Person Writing This Book

A heads-up before you read (or press play): this one talks about a parent’s illness and an end-of-life decision. If today isn’t the day for that, Episode 2 is out now too, and you can always come back.

When I sat down to map out The Castle Run Podcast, the first big question I came up against was whether to start it the same way I started the book. Because the book starts a little heavy. Chapter One of The runDisney Companion is the backstory of how I came to be the person writing it. And like a lot of us who came to distance running later in life, there was a reason it called to me.

I still don’t know where else to start. It seemed strange to dive into runDisney logistics with you without first telling you how I came to be the person putting them in front of you. So here’s the short version. The full one is Episode 1.

I wasn’t a runner

My first run for the sake of running happened about a dozen years ago. To understand how strange that was, you have to know how much I was not an athlete, much less a runner. I was a bookish kid who melodramatically dry heaved after the mile in PE class.

As an adult I was a Big Law corporate attorney working pretty grueling hours, and fitness was one piece of a slate of things I’d put together to keep my brain going when I was low on sleep. I ate a crazy clean diet. I drank a bunch of water. I meditated every day. I took a Pilates or yoga class at my firm’s gym (always leaving before Savasana, because I had no time to lie there on the floor). It was a little bit of a house of cards.

Then, not long after my younger son was born, my dad was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia, and nothing ever really went back to normal. It’s not an easy time to talk about, and I don’t talk about it to make myself sound special. I’m telling my version of a story that I know so many of us have. My dad was incredibly ill. I had two young children. My mom was breaking in front of my eyes. And I was working upwards of 100 hours a week, many of them bedside in an oncology unit or an ICU.

It was in the middle of all of that that I sat down one day to meditate, closed my eyes, and my body basically revolted. It was not sitting still with those feelings. So I did the only thing I could think of, which was throw on my sneakers and go for a run.

Running became my safe place. I wasn’t running for medals or finish lines. I was just putting on a pair of sneakers and pounding the pavement to work through my thoughts. In the book I wrote, “I ran with my feelings when my feelings hurt too much to sit with them,” and I don’t know a better way to say it.

About ten months in, on my 36th birthday, the decision about whether to end life support came down to me. Years earlier, my dad had asked me to draft his advance directive, so there was not a doubt in my mind what he would have wanted. He gave me the gift of being able to make that decision without any hesitation.

And I kept running, because by then I’d realized that running was making me a better person in more ways than just getting me through that particular time in my life.

I wasn’t a Disney person, either

A couple of months later, my mom and I were sitting at my kitchen table dealing with the mountains of red tape that come with death, and we decided we wanted to get the heck out of Dodge and do something happy. I was not a Disney person. We’d gone every couple of years when I was growing up, but I hadn’t been since my early twenties. We booked a villa at BoardWalk for no reason other than that it looked nice on the website.

It probably doesn’t shock you that planning that trip unlocked pure joy in my type A little heart. I love a spreadsheet. And then we got there. I remember standing on the hub in front of the castle one of the first nights and thinking, wow, these people get it. And I remember standing on the BoardWalk one evening that Columbus Day weekend, in weather I can only describe as room temperature with a breeze, my kids sitting on the ground watching a magic show, and suddenly thinking: I could live here.

Nobody was more surprised by that thought than me. It wasn’t about the merch or Mickey Mouse or the attractions. It was about the way the place felt, and probably that I really, really needed that strong a dose of happy at that point.

The Princess Half Marathon, and what came after

We started weaving little Disney trips into the year, and somewhere along the way I found out that runDisney was a thing. I also found out that the 2016 Princess Half Marathon was on February 21, the second anniversary of losing my dad. I thought, what a powerful way to show the universe that I’m still kicking.

I trained that winter running loops around the lake by my house, trying not to slip on the ice. February came, I ran the race, and it was wonderful. It was all the things I’d hoped it would be. I got my medal, I brought it home, and nothing had changed.

I know now that the post-race blues are a very real thing (I write about them in the book, and they get their own episode later this season). Back then, I just crashed. My dad was still gone. Work was still rough. I didn’t know what I was supposed to be doing with my life, but I knew it wasn’t that.

So I got on the phone with my friend Theresa from law school, and she said, “Lisa, you need to put a date on your calendar. I don’t care if it’s two weeks from now or two years from now.” Then, she said, spend the time between now and then wrapping your head around what it’s going to mean not to be in law anymore. I put that August on my calendar, and I walked out the door of my law firm just about six months after that first Princess Half Marathon.

A stone’s throw from the castle

With me no longer tied to an office, we were fully portable for the first time in our lives, and all that silly browsing on Redfin for homes in Central Florida suddenly became a real thing. About a year after my last day at the firm, we closed on our home in Windermere, a stone’s throw from Cinderella Castle.

Once we lived here, the races became literally local races (EPCOT’s parking lot is not even 15 minutes from my front door), so I just started running all of them. Last Wine & Dine, I hit my 100th runDisney race. Along the way I’d been writing about all of it here on the site, and I started to realize how much of what I shared from one race weekend to the next was evergreen. That’s what became The runDisney Companion, and then, from that the podcast.

Listen to Episode 1

That’s the short version. The full story is Episode 1 of The Castle Run Podcast, “How I Came to Be the Person Writing This Book,” and Chapter One of the book. You can watch or listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And if you like the idea of having all of this in a format you can hold in your hands, my book, The runDisney Companion, is available now.

From here on out, we’ll be a little more traditional. Episode 2 walks through the four race weekends, and Episode 3 backs up to cover the history of runDisney. You’ll find every episode on the podcast page.

It means the world to me that you sat with me for this story before we dig into the rest.

The Castle Run Podcast is independently produced and is not affiliated with or endorsed by runDisney or The Walt Disney Company.