To marathon or not to marathon?

Lately I have been toying around with the idea of upping my goal from doing a half marathon to doing a full marathon. Let me be clear, here, that it is not any regular marathon- it would specifically be the Wald Disney World Marathon, because seriously, that would be the only place I would willingly run 26.2 miles through. This year is the 20th anniversary of the WDW marathon, so it’s a slightly different course and has some “special surprises” which since this is Disney, will either be awesome of super lame; they really have no middle ground when it comes to surprises. They either blow it out of the water or screw it up entirely. I have spent days thinking about it, imagining myself crossing the finish line and getting my Mickey medal and the incredible feeling of pride that will come with that. But then I started imagining the training. The problem is I am a sloooooooow runner, so running 26 miles will take me between six and seven hours. And I have four small children and a husband who works crazy hours and goes to school full time while he works on his Masters degree, so there isn’t a whole lot of opportunities to take virtually the whole day off to jog around the neighborhood. It might be different if my kids were old enough to be able to watch themselves, or if I had ANY family in the area who could help out watching the kids, it would be a different matter. Right now I wake up when DH and all the kids are still asleep and get my long run in before everyone wakes up. If I wake up at 6 I can still get 13 miles in and be home by 9. It’s not a huge sacrifice for me sleep-wise. But for marathon training, any run that is 15 miles or longer would be more than 4 hours, and there would be a lot of weeks of those. Regrettably, I don’t think a full marathon is going to be something I can do until all the kids are in school- I can train during the day when they are gone. And by the point, Isobel will be 12 (!) and old enough to baby sit the sibs. I feel like I’m letting myself down a little, because once I got it in my brain that this is something I could accomplish, I feel bad that there will be no follow through or testing the theory. But it’s not NEVER, it’s just not NOW.