Hi, my name is Jason and welcome to RunTravelDisney! I have three big passions in life – running, traveling and Disney! Not necessarily in that order. RunTravelDisney is a place to share my experiences with each of these passions. At any given time, I am training for the next race, planning my next vacation or going to the Disney Parks in my free time. I hope you will enjoy following along on my journey! Here is a little background on each of them to get started.
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Run:
Never in a million years did I think I would become a runner. I absolutely hated running as a kid. Little did I know that at the age of 35, I would meet the love of my life and she would turn me into a runner! When I met Laura, I was walking, going to the gym and counting calories as part of a weight loss challenge at work. She was in the middle of a challenge to run or walk 100 miles in a month which I just thought was so cool! She had also just registered for another half marathon at Disney. Well, that peaked my interest and she brought me along for the ride, er run! She was also registered for a local 12K a few weeks later so I joined her and was hooked on that runners high!
Then I started doing RunDisney races with Laura which was truly life changing. Almost all of my closest friends today are from the RunDisney community. This community has taught me so much about running in the last eleven years and has brought me so much joy along the way! As in any sport though, there are many highs and lows. Sometimes I run for time. Sometimes I run for fun. Sometimes I run because I just have to suck it up and get it done. To date, I have run 34 half marathons, 8 full marathons and countless races of other distances.
In 2025, I challenged myself to set new personal records at as many distances as I could. I started by breaking my marathon PR which had stood for over nine years! I ended up smashing PRs at all seven distances that I attempted and finally beat my fastest ever average pace per mile. My long standing fastest pace was set way back in 2015 at that first 12K and it felt amazing to finally break that record!! I always need a goal race to keep me motivated and I am currently training for the TCS New York City Marathon in November 2026 which I will then follow up with running the 4-day, 48.6 mile Dopey Challenge at Walt Disney World just two months later! You will be hearing a lot about both of these events over the next several months!
Travel:
I thank my parents for this near lifelong passion. During our first big family vacation to Orlando, they bought a timeshare which guaranteed us a family vacation almost every year! That was at age six. At age ten, we took a two week tour of the east coast visiting Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Williamsburg and of course Orlando again! That really opened my eyes to the world outside my home state of Utah and set the course for a lifetime of travel. In high school, I participated in a two year travel and tourism studies program and then set my sights on the rest of the world!
Upon graduation, I traveled to Europe with friends on a student tour that visited five countries. I loved every second of it! I loved it so much that I worked full-time so I could pay my way and go again the next summer! I did put school on the back burner a bit for a couple years, but I don’t regret stepping out and traveling as much as I could. I never really stopped except when I just had no money! Now I enjoy traveling to new destinations with my wife Laura and taking her to see some of my favorite places from years ago.
Disney:
Now this is definitely my longest lasting and biggest passion in life! It also plays a big role in my running and travel journeys. Instead of thanking my parents for this one, I’ll just blame them instead! They never intended to turn me into a huge Disney fan! Growing up in Utah, most families travel to Disneyland if they get to visit a Disney park at all. My mom was much more interested in taking us to the other side of the country to Walt Disney World instead. She was drawn to the educational component of the classic Epcot Center of the 1980s!
I honestly don’t remember much about that first visit back in 1986, but I do have more vivid memories from our second trip in 1989. Disney’s MGM Studios Theme Park had just opened and I think Mickey’s Birthdayland might have still been in place. We were also there for the Fourth of July when New Kids on the Block performed in front of the castle!! If you think you’ve been to the park on a busy day, nothing compares to that day! It was a madhouse!
We finally went to Disneyland for the first time a year later and then there was a day that changed everything and took my enjoyment of Disney to a whole new level. I was curious to see if there were any books about Disney, so I went to the library and found a whole slew of them! I hated reading, but I read every one of them and the rest was history! I was completely obsessed with Disney from that day forward and especially loved the parks. It came as no surprise to my family and friends when I packed my bags and moved to Florida several years later. Disney is where I was meant to be! I envisioned working my entire career for the mouse too. That didn’t quite work out how I wanted it to, but I can’t imagine life without having Disney World in my backyard!!
RunTravelDisney Origins:
I’ve been thinking about starting a blog for a couple years, but it really started from the need for a new Instagram handle! I was always more of a Facebook person who never posted on Instagram. One random day I decided I wanted to start using Instagram more often and thought I needed a better handle than the generic one that had originally been assigned to me. I was thinking of some RunDisney related names, but couldn’t find one available that I liked. So I broadened the scope and came up with a name that incorporated all three of my passions – running, traveling and Disney!! Most of my social media posts were related to those three things anyway and so @runtraveldisney was born, as an Instagram profile!
It wasn’t too long after that when I started thinking I could do more with RunTravelDisney. I’ve had multiple people tell me over the years that I should write a travel blog. I even tried blogging way back in 2012 but got so frustrated with formatting it that I gave up after one post. It was a good one too!! It was about the most absolutely perfect travel day I had ever experienced up to that point in Sevilla, Spain!
Fast forward over a decade and I couldn’t stop thinking about turning RunTravelDisney into a blog. My thoughts on long runs often turned to how I would write about that run. I would also stay awake late at night during vacation trying to post everything about the day on Facebook and/or Instagram which would just leave me tired for the next day.
After my wife, Laura, and I returned from an amazing trip to Japan in late 2024, I still spent another two weeks posting about it! I’m sure everyone on social media was probably annoyed with me by that point. But still there were a few people who gave me positive feedback. I just needed to find another outlet for long form content. A year and a half later, I finally decided to stop thinking about it and just dive in to blogging!
So here I am! We’ll see how this goes. Whether you follow along with this entire journey or just find a post here or there that interests you, I hope you enjoy it!