RTTC #203 If You Passed Character Stops But Really Wanted to Stop... This is How You Do It

In this episode of Running to the Castle, Dr. Ali explains why many runDisney runners end up skipping character stops even when they really want them, and what actually needs to change so you can stop without worrying about getting swept. 

She breaks down how beginner runners often make rapid progress early on but eventually plateau around the 13–15 minute per mile pace, which leaves them starting in later corrals with little buffer ahead of the balloon ladies. 

Dr. Ali explains that the solution isn’t just trying harder or lifting heavier weights, it’s structuring your training so your workouts actually make you faster. 

She walks through common mistakes like running long runs too fast, living in the “gray zone” where every run feels hard but nothing improves, and not doing speed workouts that work for run/walk runners. 

Dr. Ali then introduces 4 simple speed workout formats designed specifically for runDisney runners: 30-20-10 intervals, progression runs, tempo run/walk intervals, and hill repeats, while emphasizing that slowing down long runs allows you to recover enough to push your limits during these workouts. 

When you train this way, you build real speed and fitness, which creates a bigger buffer on race day so you can stop for characters, take photos, and still finish strong.

Learn more about Stronger. Faster. Finisher. !

Ready to cross the finish line stronger, faster, and prouder at your next runDisney race? 

Get personalized support, smarter training, and strategies designed specifically for slow, back-of-the-pack runners who want to build a bigger buffer ahead of the balloon ladies, have time for character photos and energy to enjoy the Disney Parks. Learn more about the Stronger. Faster. Finisher. Program today and be the first to know when doors open!

Free Resources

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• Check out FREE training plans for injury-prone runDisney runners on my website. 
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  Hi, I'm Dr. Ali
  I've been running for 15+ years and been in the rehab space since 2012 when I earned my Doctor of Physical Therapy Degree. I get injury prone runDisney runners across the finish line without feeling broken.

Transcript

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Hey, how's it gone? Today I'm talking about if you passed character stops but really wanted to stop for them, this is how you do it. This is Running to the Castle, a podcast for injury-prone Run Disney runners on a journey to running magical miles. Join me, Dr. Alley, as I share the secrets I've gathered as a runner, doctor of physical therapy, and coach. You'll learn the exact ways I get my clients to the castle strong without feeling broken or held together with KT tape as they cross the finish line. So I'm going to guide you through what to do to be able to stop for character stops. This is a big concern for Run Disney runners, right? Like, we're running at Disney because we like Disney. That's how we get started in these Run Disney events. The majority of us aren't runners first. Like we have lives and we like Disney. We went to Disney, we saw somebody wearing a medal while we were walking around the park, or we have a family member who was doing them, and you found out, oh gosh, I can go and run through Disney World. That sounds like a great plan. I have an excuse to go to Disney. I am getting healthier. Maybe I'm losing weight. I am doing something good for me. And I get to do it in the most magical place or the happiest place, depending on if you're world or land. Let's do that. Or maybe you like the shoes, and that gets you kickstarted. And you're like, oh, this is actually kind of fun. And what happens is most beginner runners they start seeing a lot of progress very quickly. And that is what happens, right? So the the less fit somebody is, like workout wise, strength-wise, running-wise, activity-wise, the less fit somebody is, the biggest gains they will see in the beginning as their body is adjusting. But as they get fitter and fitter, stronger and stronger, faster and faster, or their body just settles into what they're already doing, they start plateauing and stop making progress. So you may have noticed that when you first got going, like maybe you were doing like a 25 minute per mile pace. And then all of a sudden you were doing 22 minutes per mile and 19 minutes per mile and 18 minutes per mile and 17 minutes per mile, and then 16 minutes per mile. But now you're hovering around like 13, 14, 15 minutes per mile, and you just can't get any faster. And that is that's what happens. You see these massive jumps in the beginning because there's so much room for adaptation. There's so much room to grow because you start way at the bottom. And so you make all of this progress, and maybe it's weeks or months long of progress, and then you hit a plateau. I'd say most people really start noticing a plateau at the year mark, right? And so now you're like, okay, well, I'm hitting 13 minutes per mile, 14 minutes per mile, 15 minutes per mile. I am just not breaking that. And it's so frustrating because now when you go to race, you're in corral F and G, right? You don't have a fast enough pace for you to get a proof of time. So you can't be pushed up in those corrals. And then on race day, that means that you have to sacrifice bathroom stops or character stops. And of the two, character stop is going to get sacrificed for sure because you're not going to want to pee yourself out there on the race. I mean, maybe maybe you do. I would not. Not because, I mean, maybe because I'd be embarrassed, but I don't know if you've ever peed yourself. It's really itchy. And that's that's what I think of when like I see elite runners who are like just going so fast and they're like, well, I'm not gonna stop. I'm just, I am just gonna pee. I'm like, that has got to be so itchy and gross and uncomfortable. I mean, I'm already sweating enough that it looks like I peed myself most of the time. I've been, I've gotten very strategic on what leggings I wear that don't show the sweat in like the crotch area and in my leggings just in general. It's also one of the benefits of the skirts, right? Like I think that might be why a lot of people like the skirts. Of course, they're cute. Yes, don't get me wrong. But I I think because like with the shorts and the skirts, like you you can't see the sweat stain that looks like you pay peed yourself. But if if something is going to get sacrificed, it's probably the character stop, right? Like you're you're gonna take a bathroom break over a character stop because that is a basic necessity. Gotta pee. Or you gotta poop, right? Like we're runners, like that can happen sometimes, right? Something's not settling, uh, movement gets movement, right? Like, so I'm a physical therapist, and when I was in physical therapy school, I had a rotation in a hospital. I was in North Carolina near Asheville, North Carolina, and the I had CI who saw certain patients, but we we had to be well-rounded. So I would spend a day or so once a week during my eight to 10-week clinical, and I would go work with other physical therapists. And there was this one physical therapist. This is the first time I heard this. Her name was Emily. She was inpatient acute. And, you know, we always had these patients who, well, my the people I saw were on the joint replacement floor, orthopedics and trauma, mainly joint replacements. Emily was in the med surge group. So those were medically ill or surgically appropriate patients. And so um, we didn't always like use the same phrasing to get our point across with orthopedic and trauma versus med surge, because these people are are in for very different reasons. And so in the orthopedic wing, if we if somebody wanted to go home, it was usually they needed a certain amount of movement in their knee. They needed to be up and able to walk a certain amount of distance, and they were motivated to do that because of like the with joint replacements, that's considered an elective surgery, even if like what caused it doesn't make it elective. But when we're talking about it, it's technically elective. And so they have all this education going into it. That was part of our thing at the hospital as well, was we were giving, I was giving the joint replacement course that you had the week before you came into the hospital. Anyway so it was not usually that hard to get these patients moving. Med surge, however, like they were ill, right? Like they were in there for pneumonia and sepsis. And, you know, they had some spleen problem, had to have it surgically repaired, liver problem had to have it surgically repaired, gallbladder out, stuff like that. And they did not feel good. And they just wanted to go home. And I totally got it. But one of the things that every patient has to do before they leave a hospital is they have to poop. And we have to make sure that the internal workings are working. And so I learned this phrase from Emily: movement gets movement. If you lay around in bed all day, you're not going to poop. So we need to get you up and moving. And guaranteed, people who were getting up and moving, like within minutes of them getting up and moving, they started farting. And they're like, oh my God, I'm so sorry. And we're like, no, this is great. This is perfect. We need that, right? How does this translate to me talking about running? I'm getting there. So movement gets movement, right? Like sometimes you have to have a bathroom stop because you are now very vigorously moving and your bowels get that way too. So you're gonna stop for the bathroom instead of the character stop. So how do we make it so that you can keep pushing past that 13, 14, 15, 16 minute per mile pace so that you can get faster? Right. Even if you're not, even if you're still not fast enough for the proof of time, right? Like, and a proof of time is under five hours for a marathon, under two and a half hours for a half marathon, because the half marathon and the marathon are the only ones that you sub, excuse me, you submit proof of time for. So even if you're not getting fast enough for that, a two and a half hour marathon, sub two and a half marathon would be faster than 11 minutes and 24 seconds, right? So maybe you still aren't getting to that, or maybe you are, but even if you're not, if you're getting faster, you can bump up in a corral, right? Like when we register, we choose the time frame. If you don't have a proof of time, you choose the time frame that you anticipate you will finish the half marathon or full marathon in. And so then you have the different windows of, oh, I'm gonna finish in two and a half hours to 245 or whatever the windows are. I don't remember. And I don't even know if they're the same race weekend to race weekend, but that's not the point. You could bump up, you could be in Corral D, and then you could have a significant buffer, right? Like if you are starting in Corral D as in dog, and that starts at 5.14 in the morning, clears by 525, and Corral G starts at 554 and clears by 6.06. Well, let's say you're at the very front of Corral D, you could be starting at 5.14. That's a full 40 minutes ahead of the balloon, ladies. That's a killer buffer. And on average, character stops take five minutes. Five minutes to wait, go through, get your photo taken. Now, that's not a hundred percent of the time. I do know that some more popular ones, they're 20 or 30 minutes. You could still get that one, right? Like I had a client in Stronger Faster Finisher who's who waited for Baby Yoda, I believe it was at Wine and Dine 2025. And that was a 20-minute wait. Don't quote me on it. It was something Star Wars related. Maybe it was Mandalorian. I don't I don't know Star Wars. I may have just said like the completely wrong thing, but please forgive me. I try and get into Star Wars, it has yet to happen. Anyway, 20 minutes. Okay, you could still do two of those with a 40-minute buffer. Or you could do that one, because maybe that's your top, top, top. And then you still have, you know, your 10 two-minute bathroom breaks, four or five-minute bathroom breaks, right? It's a big deal. So how do we do this? A couple of podcast episodes ago, I was talking about speed workouts. The the I'd say the top things, the top reasons runners are hitting that plateau, right? Top reasons they're hitting that plateau. What got you here won't get you there. The things that you did in the beginning, when you first made all of that progress, that was your body just doing more activity. And now your body has done that more activity than what you were doing before. So you've hit a plateau, you've hit a fitness plateau. And what got you here no longer is working because your body has changed and adapted. So now we need to change and adapt to continue to progress. So one of the things in the beginning that runners will do is one of the most popular training plans has three runs a week, which most of my training plans also have. And they have two maintenance runs that are about 45 minutes, sometimes an hour, and then a long run on the weekend. And so you're doing that, and you're going out, you're doing your run walk intervals and cruising right along. Almost every run is getting faster, and you just go out and do, right? Because that's what's working. Now, where you're at, now a year, two years or more into it, because maybe you've had some breaks because kids or injury or, you know, COVID-related stuff like the pandemic shut down and changing jobs and, you know, whatever, whatever the reason, maybe you also took a break. Now, where you're at, doing the maintenance runs and doing the long run alone, not enough. And so that's where things like speed workouts start to come in. And some cross-training starts to come in. And maybe you're looking at strength training, right? Most runners will now start looking and saying, okay, well, I'm not strong enough to be fast because you see everywhere on the internet you need strong glutes to propel yourself forward, to push yourself forward. You need strong calf muscles to push yourself forward. You need a strong core to push yourself forward. All of that is correct. Or maybe you're seeing, okay, well, people are doing strides at the end of a long run to continue to push through the wall and get faster. And they're running marathon pace on these runs, and they're running half marathon pace on these runs and 5k pace on these runs and 10k pace on these runs. But what does that mean to you? Have you done all of those races? And have you found a consistent pace that you're doing? The answer is probably no, and that's okay because we're not elite runners, right? Like the runners that I see doing that, they've been running for decades, and they've racked up all of these half marathons and all of these marathons and 5Ks and 10Ks, that they know, okay, when I go out on a 5K race, that this is the pace I do. And they get a new PR and they do this and they do that. And same thing with the 10K. But you're not an elite runner. I'm not an elite runner. So we're in the same boat here where we're not doing enough of those races to have a specific pace to be able, like, okay, well, let's go for a 5K race pace. Hold hold threshold at 5k pace or hold threshold at marathon pace. What the heck does that mean? It means nothing to me because I don't know what those paces for me are. Because I run at Disney for fun. And I do a handful maybe a year. And in the past couple of years, I've done one or two a year. So if you're anything like me, like you're doing Disney races for the most part only. And so that's where I have developed four specific speed workouts. And I forgot to mention that you're also, we are also run walkers, right? We're doing run walk. These elite runners, the ones that I see, aren't or aren't talking about it. And so maybe fartlicks and strides are for them to get them faster. But what am I doing? Four by four hundreds. I don't know how to figure out 400 meters on a treadmill. I'm not going to a track. I don't know how to figure that out, or I don't want to figure it out on the street. So that workout's not relevant to me. And so as I have gone through years and years of running myself, helping runners in the physical therapy clinic, and now with my run coaching for Run Disney runners, I developed four speed workouts that consistently work for run walkers. And to get faster, these four workouts work. It's 30, 20, 10, where you where you choose one pace, typically a walk, maybe a jog, like a slow jog for 30 seconds, then you run for 20 seconds and you sprint for 10 seconds in the most simplest form. Then there's a progression run. Oh, and you do that for rounds, and then you have a walk break to recover, and you do a bunch of rounds of that to fit the total 45-minute workout. Then we have progression runs where you start at a running pace. You do that for 30 seconds or maybe 15 seconds, however long your run interval is, and then you walk for the 30 seconds or whatever your run, excuse me, whatever your walk interval is. I actually recommend that I'm gonna eat my words here for a second. I actually recommend the walk be 30 seconds. If you're doing like 15 or 30 second uh run intervals. And then you alternate those, but every time you do a run interval, you increase your speed. So if you're doing it on the treadmill, you just bump it up by point one and you go up for as long as the workouts uh for half the workout, and then you come back down for the second half of the workout. And that's one. Then there's a tempo run where you practice going specific paces for five minutes. You're doing your run-walk intervals. So let's say you do 30-30, you do five rounds of 30-30 at the designated run-walk interval pace. And you do that for, you know, the total time in that 45-minute workout. And then the last one is hills. That's where you run up a hill for 30 seconds and then you walk down the hill and recover for two minutes. And you do that, it's usually about 10 rounds. That one I know off the top of my head for in the 45-minute total workout. Now, you also have warm-up and cool down. Those are outside of that speed workout, right? So those are the types of workouts that actually get you faster. It improves your fitness, improves your heart's ability to pump enough blood out and then recover, right? Because that's what we're looking for. You need to get faster with your heart and your lungs being more physically fit. You also get faster by your body just moving and like your legs turning over faster, right? Like, have you ever noticed that on a slow, easy jog, your body looks different than if you're doing a solid run? And that even looks different from if you're sprinting, right? So an easy, long run pace is going to look like a bouncy walk, maybe, right? Like, and you're you're only swinging your arms a little bit, you're maybe shuffling your feet, barely picking them up off the ground, and then a run, you're pumping your arms a little bit harder, you're bending your knees a little bit more, and then a sprint, oh, you're really pumping your arms and you're really like driving your knee forward, bending your leg, and you're, you know, you end up traveling a little bit more space, more distance with each step because you're pushing it, right? Like, can you imagine what those three different things look like, those three different paces look like? And so, so we're doing, we're doing that. And so if you're looking to get faster, excuse me, if you're looking to be able to stop for those character stops, you need to get faster, right? Or stronger, whatever word you're looking for. But lifting heavy weights in this sense of getting stronger is not a direct translation. So, yes, it is important. I'm not talking about doing that today, because if you've if you've been in my world for any length of time, you know there are six categories that make up your successful efforts in training, right? Like you have your strength, that's your strength workouts. Then you have your your training. So that's your running, that's your cross-training. Now, cross-training is not the same as strength training. I do not use those words synonymously. Cross-training is a cardiovascular event that's not running. So that's riding a bike, that's using the elliptical, that's swimming, that's paced walking. Those are examples. And then we also have stretching and mobility, rest and recovery, hydration and fueling, and then um things like shoes and equipment fall into the last category. And so we have all six of those things. Is strength training an important part of feeling good when you hit the finish line? Yes. It's it's an indirect translation to getting faster, though. So today I'm talking about the Direct translation to getting faster. And that has to do with the cardiovascular, the running workouts that you are doing, including those four speed workouts that I just mentioned. And it also includes your long run. Now, the long run, the mistake I see runners make is running their long run too fast. And that becomes a problem because you end up in what I call the gray zone with all of your runs. Because when you're doing your long run, if you're doing your long run fast, you're exhausted, right? Like the end of a race, you're exhausted. And I expect that to happen. I don't expect you to feel broken and like you can't manage anything, but you're gonna be tired because you pushed yourself over a long period of time. Do you want to feel the way you feel there for three months of training, for six months of training, for nine months of training? No. And also when you push your limit or try and push your limit on your pace and go farther, that's changing two variables, right? Like whenever we're looking at seeing what's working, if we change two variables at once, we don't know what the problem is. And so I have taken those two things, separated them out, and I know that to be able to run longer distance from my professional experience as a run coach, that you need to build time on your feet and just and keep going further. But when you keep going further and go faster, you end up still being tired two to three days later from that long run for when you are now supposed to be doing your speed workout. And so then your speed workout, you're already starting tired. And so you have tired legs. You have legs that feel like lead and they just aren't picking up and they aren't going anywhere. And so you are too tired from your long run to push your limits on that speed workout. And I mentioned it the other day. There's what we call, what I call the gray zone, right? Like you're you're running too hard on your easy runs, so you can't recover, and you're running too easy on your speed workouts, on your hard runs, so you don't get faster. And you end up being all of your paces end up being muddled together. They're all within 30 seconds, a minute of each other, right? Like of my 30, 20, 10 overall, my pace for that overall is the same as what my long run pace is or my progression run, that speed workout, it's looking within 30 seconds to a minute of what my long run pace was. And you end up never hitting your upper limits. Maybe you don't even know what your upper limits are, but you're never hitting your upper limits on those speed workouts. So you're never getting faster. If it doesn't challenge you, it doesn't change you. And I'm not saying that your workout doesn't feel challenging in the moment, because it will, and it does. It feels challenging. And you're like, oh my God, I'm exhausted. And you're exhausted all of the time. And it's because you don't have enough room to recover, yet you don't have enough energy to push it. And so your heart rate is still sky high, you're breathing so heavy, and everything just is the same amount of effort over and over and over again. But when you look back and you look at the paces, you're seeing that everything is 14 to 16 minute per mile paces. And so you, you just, and that's what you end up doing on race day as well. But what happens when you slow down on your long run, you end up not exhausting yourself. So that when it's time to go to your speed workout, now you're hitting 12s and 13s in those speed workouts when your upper limit maybe was 1230, right? So now we've gone past that upper limit. Of course, you have to know your upper limit for this to work. And you also need to slow down. One thing I hear most runners say is I I just I can't go any slower. I can't go faster, but I also can't go any slower. I literally can't move any slower. That is possible for some runners. I'd say for most runners, we eventually do find that slower pace. But I also invite you to look at are you looking at that slow pace, like the actual movement of what you're doing, you can't physically go any slower. Or are you looking at like your average pace between your run walk intervals and it doesn't get any slower? Because your run walk interval average, if you're doing run walk at 3030, well, let's say the average is 16 minutes per mile. Well, you could get to 16 by doing a 15-minute per mile run and a 17 minute per mile walk, or a 14-minute per mile run and an 18-minute per mile walk, or a 13-minute per mile run and a 19-minute per mile walk, or a 12-minute per mile run and a 20-minute per mile walk, right? Or an 11-minute per mile run and a 20-minute, 21-minute per mile walk, right? All of those average out to 16 minute per mile. Well, what if you were doing the 13 minute per mile run and the 19 minute per mile walk? Or what if you did 13 minute per mile run and a 25 minute per mile walk? That average pace slows down. So that's one option, right? Like if you physically can't go slower than a 13 minute per mile run on the run interval, slow down the walk or add more time to your walk interval. That one I I recommend less often, but it's an option. Another thing is when you're in the build phase of your training life, which if you don't have any more uh races this Run Disney season, you're in it now. Walk all of your long runs and just focus on the speed workouts right now. Because that will guarantee that you're going slower, right? And if your walking pace is the same as your running pace, then something needs to change there, right? You could also figure out what your absolute slowest running pace of your run walk interval is. And I played around with this the other day. So I really haven't talked about this ever. This is actually brand new. Um, but I was playing around with it the other day because I did my run pace testing outside for the very first time. Normally I do it on the treadmill. Did it for the very first time outside because I was very curious. I had a conversation in Stronger Faster Finisher that made me very curious in how to adjust this. And uh, if you know me, I don't program something that I wouldn't do myself. I still stand by it. I do recommend pace testing inside on a treadmill. It is the easiest way to control your paces and know what they are. But I do have runners who don't have access to a treadmill or are actually or are scared of the treadmill, just the belt moving. They've never been on it before. So, okay, now I have tried the pace testing outside. And so if you really don't know what your easy pace is, excuse me, you really don't know what like your slowest running pace is, which would translate to the easy pace, walk progressively faster until you hit the point where it's no longer a walk. So just walk faster and faster and faster until it you just can't keep walking and it has to turn into a job. Try that. See if that might be your easy run pace. Now, I haven't tested that with anybody else. You are hearing it first because I just did it the other day and I played around with it. So if you try that, let me know how it went. But that could be something, but you have to slow down in order to have enough recovery so that you can push it on those speed workout days. And, you know, I was talking about upper limits, right? You may be saying, Well, I don't even know what my upper limits are. That's where you have to pace test. You have to go through the pace test to see what you can do in optimal conditions, because that's what it is, right? Like when I walk my clients through pace testing, we are in optimal conditions. You aren't exhausted, you've eaten, you've rested. This is the only workout you're doing that day. So we are seeing optimally what is your moderate pace, what is your hard pace, and what is your easy pace in that order. So then, but I used to do it in a different order and it got hard at the end. And I realized, well, I was looking at the numbers and I'm like, I it does I think this person could actually go faster. Well, duh, Allie, you're a ding-dong. They're tired. You're tired by the time you got to the hard pace testing because you did 10 minutes of easy, you did 10 minutes warm-up, you've done two rounds of five-minute walking at least. Allie, they're like 40 minutes into this workout already. What are you doing here? So I I've reorganized it. And I may even reorganize it again, and I'll test it out to see if maybe hard pace testing should be done first. This is this isn't real time. As I guide more runners through this, I'm learning different ways to say things. I'm learning different ways to test things. It's still the same concept, just a different order based on feedback and numbers. Because the one way that I did things three years ago, that exact way, may not be a hundred percent accurate anymore now that I've had a hundred people go through it. Right? And that's what you get. Like, as I'm learning something, I am sharing that with you. I'm not, you know, stuck in the mud with nope, this is the one way, only way. Who knows? Maybe five years from now, I'll be like, I have a completely new way to pace test. I don't know. That's five years from now, right? But what I know works now is you have to go easy on your easy days so that you can go hard on your hard days and get out of that gray zone. Get out of the middle and stick to the ends. Because if you're not going easy on your easy days, you're not recovering. You're going too fast, too hard to recover. Your body is exhausted all of the time. And if you're never hitting your hard pace in your speed workouts, you, if it doesn't challenge you, it doesn't change you. If you don't go beyond that amount, you don't go beyond that amount, right? So take this information, adjust it to fit your training program. And if you're listening to this in real time, I am doing a new workshop on March 17th at 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern. So it's the same day that Marathon Weekend signups are. I'm going to walk you exactly through all of this. I will let you know this is actually going to be a paid workshop. The reason for that is I want to really dive in, get you the exact things that you need, as opposed to just giving generalized information that could wishy-washy hit a ton of people. I want to really dive in and give you the specifics. You can ask questions, we can go over your exact paces, but I'm going to go through exactly what to do so that you can get faster in time for this. Could even get you faster for springtime surprise. You would have a whole month to be able to get faster for springtime surprise. It will definitely get you faster for wine and dine training or marathon weekend training. So marathon goofy or dopey. That's why I'm doing it when I'm doing it. So be on the lookout for information on that. You can check the link in the show notes because by the time this comes out, there will be that information. If you don't see it, send me a DM, run Disney DPT, and I'm happy to get you going on that.