Disney Marathon Review

Overall I was VERY pleased with how Marathon Weekend went, yes it was crowded but not insane crazy like Princess last year!

We stayed at Port Orleans Riverside and due to a "technical difficulty" (you really can't teleport cars yet) we had a car since dh hadn't driven his car back to ORD from being based in FLL.  Let me say this now, I LOVED having a car for race weekend, it really was a sanity saver. We drove every morning and rather than have to get up even earlier and wait for the bus (which for 1/2 and full day the last bus was at 4am!).  We slept in a little and still left in enough time to get there.  The other plus side of this was that after the race you could just get in the car and leave, you didn't have to wait with a bunch of other tired smelly people for the bus.

So the 5K and 10K traffic wasn't bad, and the course wasn't crowded at all.  Both were nice courses the 10K was basically just an expanded 5K with the addition of runing aroud Boardwalk.

The half course, let me say this now, it's the same 1/2 course as Princess, and I don't like it.  I think it's boring and long.  Basically you run out and back from Epcot to the Magic Kingdom. I dislike that you don't run through the parks much (esp compared to Wine and Dine where you run through 3!) and I despise the "hell stretch" after the Magic Kingdom where you all are (trying) to run on one lane of a two lane road.  In short the 1/2 course blows, with that said it seemed a little less crowded than Princess last year, thank god for small things I guess.

The full marathon course for the first 7-8 miles is the same as the 1/2...whooo hooo....After that we got to run around the speedway and then onto the full marathons version of "hell stretch" from the half.  Of course we had already run my "hell stretch" from the half since it was the same course for the first 7-8miles.  And it made me think that "hell stretch" behind Polynesian wasn't so bad compared to what was coming.  After you left the speedway they ran you down a little service road that connects to Animal Kingdom....which had basically nothing on it.....by that I mean no bathrooms!

Once we ran through Animal Kingdom then it was down the road to ESPN.  Now I'm not sure that I hated this as much as the little connector road from MK to AK because at least at ESPN there were bathrooms.  But running around  ESPN is like a rat in a maze.  We ran 3-4 miles there zig-zagging everywhere, around the track, around the baseball field, back and forth!  Once we were free of ESPN it was the home stretch, just about 5 mile left!  It was a quick run over to MGM (Hollywood Studios) then around Boardwalk and back to Epcot!

I have to admit I loved the way they did crowd control at the end of the races so much better than Princess, no hour wait to try and get out of the runner holding corral and I found dh within about 5 mins of leaving the runner area!

All in all I would do this again....maybe....someday....if I was drunk when I signed up!  A marathon was on my bucket list, but I'm not sure it would make my bucket list twice :)