Race Report – 2020 Disney 10K

This year, I finally returned to racing at Disney Marathon weekend. This year was “only” the 10k for me, since it was on my birthday. I considered running the half, but decided 10k was plenty. There would be opportunity for longer distances later. Cue ominous music.

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. It took us 50 minutes to get across the start line, which is just something to remember for future races. 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 did have a negative moment – there was a guy throwing water over his head and basically throwing it directly into the face of the people behind him. So I said something him, just asking him to step over. He gave me attitude, so I responded with something like “Thanks so much for understanding! Have a great day!” And then throughout the race, I kept seeing him giving me evil looks. Come on, people, use a little common sense.

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. It was a slower race than I wanted, but really, I can’t complain too much. We were there to have fun after all.

(Now, don’t get me started on the new Club runDisney that they’ve announced. Infuriating.)

I’ll be there next year for the marathon, which is on my birthday. Terrifying. TERRIFYING.

Final results: 1:29:19.