Running With Mice
A casual stroll with your 13,999 best friends
Happy new year friends! It’s been a minute. The start of 2024 has been big! I began my paternity leave at the start of the year, and it has been great to spend more time with the little guy. Though shortly into my time off, I flew off to LAX to run the Disneyland Half Marathon.
A solo excursion
Originally we had thought to make this a family trip, but the reality of a trip with a 2 1/2 month old set in and it seemed like maybe this shouldn’t be his first vacation. So I planned for a solo trip out to California. Luckily, our good friend Christine was available to hang out. We ate at Top Chef winner Shirley Chung’s Ms. Chi Cafe, record shopped at Going Underground and Amoeba, and visited the Vasquez Rocks Natural Area Park, filming site of many TV shows and movies, maybe most notably several Star Trek episodes and movie scenes. Including where Kirk fought the Gorn!
Running the streets
Of course, the reason for this whole trip as the half marathon at Disneyland. I had run the half marathon in Walt Disney World last January, and we had run the Star Wars 5k in Florida back in 2018, so I had some expectations for runDisney events. runDisney hasn’t put on an event in California since 2017, so there was a lot of excitement about the return to running at the Disneyland Resort. And the merch reflected that, with most of it proudly announcing this return.
Racing at Disneyland is very, very different from racing in Walt Disney World. Namely due to the amount of space available: Disneyland Resort is 500 acres (.78 square miles) versus the 27,000 acres (43 square miles) that Disney occupies in central Florida. This is one reason there’s no full marathon in Disneyland; there simply isn’t room for it. The route for the Disneyland half, after the first mile getting to the resort area, spent about 4 miles inside the actual parks loping through California Adventure’s front- and backstage areas before heading into Disneyland Park proper for an iconic run up Main Street USA, through the various lands, and eventually out to the streets of Anaheim for the remaining 8-ish miles.
By contrast, the half marathon in Florida begins outside Epcot, taking you up through the Magic Kingdom and back through Epcot. For the full marathon, you run through all four theme parks.
One thing about Disney races: they start early. The starting areas open at 3am, the corrals at 4, and the races are scheduled to kick off at 5. It’s frankly brutal. But that’s what you sign up for! Thankfully I ended up at a cheap hotel super close to the starting area, so I could sleep in until… 3:15am. Luxurious. Races in Florida, you have to take a shuttle bus from any of the resort hotels to the starting area, adding to the morning’s logistical prep.
While this race went better than expected (I had been experiencing some foot pain in the days leading up to the race, which had me worried!), and I don’t want to always compare this to the Florida counterparts, especially since they hadn’t organized these races in 5+ years, I had a number of issues. I knew the course would spend the majority of its miles outside of Disney property; that’s inevitable in Disneyland without just doing some loops through the park, which sounds like a planning nightmare. And I knew the character stops and entertainment that are so iconic to runDisney events would only be within that 4-ish miles in-park.
What I did not expect was the poor organization and character opportunities. I was excited to have placed into Corral A thanks to my relatively speedy showing at the 2022 Baltimore Running Fest half marathon that was still within the window for times. My experience at the 2023 WDW Half taught me that early corrals have much shorter lines for characters. So I thought to myself “they’re going to load the parks with characters and things to make up for the fact that so much of the route won’t have any.” Oh ho, not so! And it appears that some of the characters weren’t even out for the start of the race; in some post-race reports and YouTube videos, there were characters like Chip & Dale, Chewbacca, and Rey later on that were not there for me. One of the most egregious stories I heard was about Dumbo, who was out for Corrals A and B, but left stage and castmembers told runners he would be back in a half hour. I cannot imagine waiting around for half an hour in the middle of a race!
Once we left property and were in Anaheim, it was basically a race like any other. A few cheering groups here and there, some local high school marching bands playing us on, a classic car group showing off their rides in the parking lot of Angels stadium. It was fine. But runDisney events are supposed to be more than fine. We all know about the Disney magic, and this felt lacking in that regard. And these races are far too expensive to lack magic: the half cost $235 just to sign up for.
I don’t mean to be entirely negative. I liked the course, it was relatively flat, the park sections were great to run through; it’s always a rush being able to run through the parks before they open, with everything lit up for us. Hopefully this all just growing pains as they get back into the swing of holding these events in California. There’s a Halloween themed race weekend coming up later in the year, and I look forward to reading about that being a more successful event!
Onward and upward
I do have one more runDisney event coming up: the Springtime Surprise Challenge in April. This time we’ll all be going. I’m running all three races that weekend: 5k, 10k, and 10-miler. It feels ambitious, but as long as I run them all smart, and recovery properly after, I think it’ll be great. And it’s going to be fun to experience the parks with the little man!
Have you done a runDisney event? Would you? Sound off in the comments!