The Bismarck Marathon

The Bismarck Marathon

The Bismarck Marathon

( 1 review )
100% of reviewers recommend this race
  • Bismarck ,
    North Dakota,
    United States
  • September
  • 6 miles/10K, 13.1 miles/Half Marathon, 26.2 miles/Marathon
  • Road Race
  • Event Website

Christine Guenther

Spokane, Washington, United States
73 121
2018
"Bismarck Half Marathon"
Overall
T-Shirts/SWAG
Aid Stations
Course Scenery
Expo Quality
Elevation Difficulty
Parking/Access
Race Management
Christine Guenther's thoughts:

First year running the Bismarck Marathon. I was looking for a race to knock off North Dakota from my Half Marathon race list and this happened to fall on a weekend I wasn’t working so here I came. It’s a Saturday race with a 5K/10K/Half Marathon/Marathon, all on the same day. I got in late on Thursday night and made it over to my hotel in downtown Bismarck.

Expo: 9 AM to 9PM on Friday prior to race day at the start/finish area over in Cottonwood Park. The race had emailed out some instructions on where to go, but there was no obvious place to find where the packet pick up was on the race website. When you got to Cottonwood Park, there was no good direction as to what entrance to go into, which was a bit confusing because there were 2 different entrances. After I made it to the correct intrance, it took about 2 minutes to get my bib and swag. They assign you a bib right there, rather than ahead of time. They also had past race long sleeved shirts on sale for $1 which was good since I needed a throw away shirt. No frills expo, that’s for sure. If you couldn’t make it on Friday, they had race day pick up starting at 5:30 AM.

Parking: 2-3 different lots which was more than enough on race day.

Start time: 7:30 AM for the half and full, 7:40 AM for the 5K, 7:50 for the 10K.

Race course: relatively flat, though some hill when you’re going over the bridges. That was meh when you’re running over bridges into the wind. There were some areas where you were crossing intersections, though there were plenty of police and volunteers directing traffic. Course itself was a loop course. The first 5.25 (ish) of the half marathon was with the full marathon before the full branched off. On the half course, there were still some full marathon mile markers because it looped back around at some point and picked up the half course for the last part of their race. It would have been helpful to have some sort of color system to differentiate mile markers for the 5K/10K/Half and Full mile markers, as there was a lot of overlap with some of the miles. The only thing that differentiated the markers was a little bit of writing in the right upper corner of the miler markers that were hard to see. Also, no time on course, so be sure to have your Garmin or timing device.

Post race: simple. They had medals as you finished, chocolate milk, water and bananas

Qualifier: For the Boston and New York City Marathon.

Overall a good race. Small for sure (~330 people for the half marathon). I wish they’d split the 5K/10k to one day and the half/full marathon on another to make a challenge out of it. Just a few things above that I’d change

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