Walt Disney World Marathon Weekend

Walt Disney World Marathon Weekend

Walt Disney World Marathon Weekend

( 159 reviews )
99% of reviewers recommend this race
  • Orlando,
    Florida,
    United States
  • January
  • 3 miles/5K, 6 miles/10K, 13.1 miles/Half Marathon, 26.2 miles/Marathon, Other
  • Road Race
  • Event Website

Megan Sullivan

Takoma Park, Maryland, United States
24 9
2020
"Crowded but fun!"
Overall
T-Shirts/SWAG
Aid Stations
Course Scenery
Expo Quality
Elevation Difficulty
Parking/Access
Race Management
Megan Sullivan's thoughts:

I love the spirit of Disney races. This year, the 10k fell on my birthday, so of course I was running.

Expo:
As I didn't arrive into town til Thursday, I hit up the expo the afternoon the day after it opened. In previous years, some of the popular race-specific items would have been sold out, but there were plenty of items of all sorts still available. I wasn't looking for anything in particular, but it was fun to browse.

Disney has done a good job of spreading out the expo into multiple buildings to alleviate crowds. A definte plus.

Race:

Race morning dawned stupidly early, as is the norm for runDisney. We stayed at a monorail resort, but on race morning, the only transportation available was busses. I'm a huge fan of the monorail, but the bus worked just fine. Not too long of a wait, and our bus driver only got slightly turned around once. We made it to the race start in plenty of time.

I liked the way the corrals were setup this year - corrals were lined up next to each other and then filtered out the front and over into the starting chute, unlike in many races, where the corrals are lined up in a long line and you have to walk through the other corral spaces to get to the start. I felt like this reduced the amount of walking to the start line. They also metered people through the start, using a ribbon of sorts, so each corral was divided into mini-corrals for the start. This definitely helped some of the crowding.

We were unexpectedly in the last corral due to a mistake with placement on my sister's bib (so I went back with her), and it was definitely crowded. We were planning to do a run/walk and spent much of the time going around walkers. Nothing against walkers, but it would be nice if people kept to the sides when walking and didn't walk in such huge groups going across.

I enjoyed the course - I felt like we got to see a lot of Epcot, and plenty of backstage too. In general, some of the overcrowding was frustrating, but that's to be expected in a race like this, especially when we started further back than where we should have started.

Post Race:

Disney gives you water, PowerAde, a banana, and a snack box, definitely plentiful food for after a 10k. And to the delight of many, the weird cheese was back this time. (Personally, I didn't care that much, but apparently the cheese was a THING.) Plenty of portapotties after the race and the busses back to the resorts were easy.

While I heard there were some logistics issues for races later in the weekend, I couldn't say the same for the 10k.

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