They call Disney’s the most magical start you’ve ever seen, and from my privileged position as a roaming journalist with a disregard for barricades, it’s colorful and fun. I’m close enough to see that the legionaries actually wear flesh-colored bodystockings under their skimpy armor, so the predawn air feels real and cold to them, too.

Unfortunately, most of the runners see nothing of all this. My wife was there in the middle of the pack, and later when she came across my closeup photos of the long-legged legionaries dancing on a floodlit stage, they came as a perplexing surprise. I quickly turned to the pictures of her finish.

She did see the fireworks, though. When the gun booms, the tops of the pillars explode upwards, whooshing and sizzling, giant Roman candles spectacular against the night. The runners cheer as they surge forward, Hercules roars huskily, and I leap aboard the funny little open-topped, fake-old-fashioned bus (“The Berliner”) that (I think) is the designated media vehicle. There’s a moment of confusion as Marty Liquori and Hal Rothman, who have a TV show to produce, try to establish which of the three funny little open-topped buses will go the route they need, but nobody seems to know, and then we’re away, hotly pursued by Keith Brantly.

After a minute or so of darkness we pass Epcot, where crowds line the course clapping and cheering and shouting. Doubt intrudes again. Are these real people? Or has Disney trucked out a few hundred animated wax dummies from Magic Kingdom and Epcot, reprogrammed for the day to clap and shout “Lookin’ good! You can do it!”?

The rides I did the day before at Epcot showed that Disney could easily handle such an illusion. But at 5:07 for Brantly’s first mile, there was nothing illusory about the wind chill on the upper deck of the media bus. I hunker down for a long ride.

The idea of a marathon at Walt Disney World has seemed appealing since I heard about the first one five years ago. As a non-American, I can’t claim an inward view of such an essentially American cultural phenomenon, but the Disney achievement is not to be underrated. In some ways their creation of a huge-scale popular culture committed wholly to the values of peaceful collaboration, well-behaved pleasure, and education is similar to the achievement of 20th-century sport. So the alliance between Disney and running is potentially an important one.

Anyway, I’ve always liked Disney. Like most people, some of my best early pleasures and learning experiences came from Disney movies — Dumbo, Bambi, and Snow White for my generation.

Apparently, I persuaded my poor mother, struggling to keep a home together in war-battered Britain, to sit twice through Bambi. I still laugh at the memory (at least 50 years old now) of a Goofy short where he gets terrified by inexplicable sounds that follow him downstairs at night — which, in fact, are his own dangling suspenders. The wicked witch in Snow White is still eerie to me, and (like most people) I can’t hear “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” without seeing Mickey Mouse’s army of menacing brooms in Fantasia.

As a young parent, I discovered the delight of escorting my kids through the Los Angeles Disneyland. I persuaded them to go twice round “Pirates of the Caribbean.” My one regret about their growing up is that I no longer have that excuse. Somehow I can’t bring myself, at nearly 60, to stand in Disney lines alone. When I confessed this during the day at Epcot to my new friend, Sacramento marathoner Gary Jensen, he wisely said, “Wait till you have grandchildren.” It’s good to have “Pirates of the Caribbean” to look forward to again.

“Don’t confuse fantasy with reality; there’s nothing ‘make-believe’ about this marathon,” the race shirt declares, and the program follows the same theme. The start may be magical, but a marathon is hard. OK, that’s a good message for runners, but in Walt Disney World it’s not always so easy to tell fantasy and reality apart.

Gary and I shared a relaxed day at Epcot, while our wives were confined in a business conference. Astonishingly life-like models enact the history of “Spaceship Earth,” fearsome three-dimensional snakes and cats strike out at you all too convincingly in “Honey, I shrunk the audience,” and on the far side of the lake, you recover by strolling through exact replicas of the Doge’s Palace, a Kyoto temple, and an English village, and by drinking German beer on a German street. It was a day of diverting illusions, a half-fantasy world where everything is safe, clean, friendly, and fake — and you keep buying things.

By contrast, the open top of the media bus was all reality. I don’t like to complain, as the race was well organized and the 10,000 runners all seemed to have a ball. But if the marathon is intended in part to generate good public relations for the theme parks, it seems short-sighted to put the media on a vehicle that was too big to drive through the entrances. The result is that we saw nothing of the only interesting parts of the course.

Along dark and featureless highways we chugged patiently ahead of the field, but when they turned eagerly into Epcot, Magic Kingdom Park, Disney-MGM, and the rest, we were shut out, like Dumbo or Quasi or any of those marginalized underdogs Disney is so fond of portraying. I am told there were fireworks, lights and lasers, castles and characters. But while the runners got high on these attractions, our driver had to put his foot down to take us the long way round. We sliced through the cold misty air, and froze.

Hard-bitten journos clung to each other for warmth and comfort, and I lay prone on the floor with my ring binder meagerly sheltering my head. All we needed on that windswept upper deck to complete the experience was Captain Ahab in the bows. So don’t expect me to describe Cinderalla’s Castle. The best I can do is quote another disgruntled upper-deck passenger: “I was there yesterday with my kids. The castle is all pink, decorated with candy canes and all that stuff.”

I am left with one special memory, a visual effect that out-Disneyed Disney. The sun was reluctantly rising (journalists were desperately chanting, “Come up, sun!”) and its low light struck the lingering mist. Coming over the crest of a low hill at about eight miles with the sun behind, Keith Brantly suddenly appeared gigantically enlarged, a titanic shimmering shape suspended magically in mist four feet off the ground, striding hugely toward us in a great halo of shining light. Talk about godlike. Neither Disney nor Spielberg could have beaten that one.

Being an ungodlike, ordinary mortal (even, I admit it, a zero), I abandoned the media bus at the half-marathon finish and scuttled into the nearest square of sunshine. Had I stayed aboard the bus I might have gone down in history as the first person to die of cold in Orlando.

Ahead on the full marathon course lay Disney’s Wide World of Sports, which I had visited at length two days earlier. It’s the Xanadu of world sport — expanses of fertile ground, stately architecture, measurelessly superb facilities. Living partly as I do in a little country with meager sporting resources (six all-weather tracks in the whole of New Zealand, and none indoors), I was overawed by the quality, the scale, the beauty, and the impeccable condition of the Disney complex. I’m tempted to say that the running track is surfaced in compressed $100 bills, but I don’t want to make fun of a commitment to sports and their role in modern society of which I entirely approve.

The “fieldhouse” is a kind of temple of sports, its architecture a postmodern mix of art deco and Spanish church. There are facilities for more than 30 different sports, indoor and outdoor, all good enough to stage major events. Baseball alone has a “quadriplex” of four world-class fields.

Naturally I gravitated to the training track, where young athletes from Dennison University, one of the many visiting groups who use the facilities, were working with their coaches. I watched groups of runners, young female pole vaulters, a sprinter running bursts while towing a heavy metal yoke across the manicured infield. I may have seen more of the future here than I did the next day at Planet Earth.

Sport, I believe, is among the modern era’s greatest achievements, and Disney’s Wide World of Sports gives this achievement physical expression, a great setting for a great human activity, as the stadium and the theater of Delphi were in their day, to return to the Greek theme.

The race Expo at Disney’s Wide World of Sports also returned to it, with an exhibition of wax sculptures of runners, most dressed in Greek-style tunics. I was glad to see sport made the subject of art: the Muses would approve. But I regretted that the art and the whole Herculean race “theme” were so prettified as a version of the gutsy power and rich meanings of Greek athletics history and the Hercules myth.

At mile 20 on the course, for instance, the runners passed through “The Gates of Hades,” an amusing Disney equivalent of The Wall. Patrolling the Gates were Hades himself (a villain from the movie) and his two comically inane attendants, Pain and Panic. As a runner, I thought that was one cutesification too many. In the creation myth of our sport, the messenger Pheidippides was running back from Sparta with the news that Athens would have to fight the invading Persians alone, when he met Pan, the God of Nature. Pan assured the weary runner that he would bring divine help. At the Battle of Marathon, Pan ran among the enemy spreading confusion, which took the name of Panic (Pan-ikos). I’m no cultural snob, but I didn’t like Panic being turned into a bumbling sidekick at the gates of hell.

All Disney productions have gone soft-edged and superficial like this, I regret to say. When Fantasia or Pinocchio drew sounds from Beethoven and images from Hokusai, they were significantly closing the gap between “serious” art and popular entertainment. Pinocchio may have been a softer version of Collodi’s story, but there was real moral menace in his downfall on Pleasure Island. The pathos of Bambi’s mother and Snow White’s poisoning required a real effort of response from characters and audience. In those days, Melpomene, the Muse of Tragedy, was a real force in Disney’s art. The original Depression-era Mickey Mouse was a figure close to Charlie Chaplin for comic resilience under adversity.

Today’s Disney movies reduce that darker dimension to warm-fuzzy sound-bites like “Zero to Hero” or “take your place in the Circle of Life.” The “toga-themed” Hercules and Megara have about as much mythic resonance as those endless fitness-machine commercials starring Walker Texas Ranger and assorted bimbos. Victor Hugo’s evil hunchback is the brave, vertebrally-challenged Quasi. The Mickey Mouse who presides over Orlando and the Disney Marathon is a merchandise logo with a plastic-surgery smile. Melpomene wears pink.

But it was all harmless fun. The races were run in the 1990s Disney spirit of happy self-improvement, and the day turned sunny and warm.

I chatted with half-marathon winner Keith Brantly, who had run at a workmanlike 5:30-mile speed well clear of the field, and is focused on serious marathons ahead, starting with Pittsburgh in early May.

I watched Joan Benoit Samuelson, committed as ever, kick past Laurie

When Gordy Ainsleigh’s horse came up lame and couldn’t compete in the Western States 100-Mile One-Day Ride (for the Tevis Cup) over the High Sierra, the high-spirited Gordy set off on his own to do that which was supposed to confound mere human beings. Less than 24 hours later, Gordy had become a running legend and had spurred into existence what became the Western States Endurance Run. In turn, that race spawned a bounty of ultradistance trail races.

But through it all, the Western States 100 has remained the granddaddy of them all—a granddaddy who turns a mere 25 years old this June. In admiration of and celebration of this seminal ultra trail race, Marathon & Beyond is proud to present a special section contributed by a handful of the people who have been instrumental in making the Run a landmark:

• Gordy Ainsleigh recreates the nearly 24-hour-long labor pains to birth the footrace.
• Race director Norm Klein jogs through the entire 24-year history leading to the race’s silver anniversary.
• Great-grandmother Helen Klein recounts her long-standing love affair with the granddaddy of all trail ultras.
• Doug Latimer takes us to a Western States 100 finish that should never have happened but miraculously did.
• Tony Rossmann struggles through the slowest, last, and most glorious of all his Western States finishes.

Sometimes, an opportunity grasped defines a lifetime.