On January 14, 2024, I completed the Disneyland Half Marathon, which was my 5th half marathon – all of which have been RunDisney races! Overall I had a decent experience, but let’s just say it did NOT add up to the races at WDW…

Normally I would would write up a story version of ::gestures:: alll of this, but I have a LOT to say about my first RunDisney experience at Disneyland, so this time I’m going with pro and con lists 🙂

BIB PICK-UP & FITNESS EXPO

PROS:

• Because this is a much smaller race numbers-wise, check-in/bib pick-up and the fitness expo were all in the same building – the little convention center attached to the Disneyland Hotel. This made the process very quick, and it was neat that we were able to walk right over to Downtown Disney from there.
• That said, if I had known how quick it would be and how small the expo was, I would have checked into our hotel (the Camelot Inn & Suites right across the street from the main park entrances) first and therefore only had to pay THEIR parking fee instead of also coughing up the money to park in the Disneyland garages. True, it was a reduced rate of $10 (from I think $35?!), but it’s $10 I didn’t really *need* to spend, and only did so because we arrived in Anaheim at about 2:45 PM and I was worried about having enough time to both pick up my bib and wander the expo.

CONS:

• The expo was tiny and pretty lame compared to the one at WDW – and therefore not really worth spending more than 15 minutes checking out. I knew it would be smaller, but the only really neat thing about it was the Percy Jackson photo op…and that only because my younger step kid was with us and is obsessed with that series.

HOTEL – CAMELOT INN & SUITES

NOTE: We did NOT stay at an official Disneyland hotel, so what I have to say here – the good and the not-so-good – obviously isn’t a reflection on Disney or RunDisney.

PROS:

• This hotel is SUPER convenient if you are ever going to Disneyland and don’t want to cough up an additional $100+ more per night to stay at a Disneyland hotel – it’s literally across the street from the main park entrances.
• Furthermore, I got very lucky, having booked this hotel right after I registered for the race and then finding out right before race weekend that it was at most a 5 minute walk to the corral staging area for the half marathon.
• The room itself was spacious and the beds weren’t completely uncomfortable, at least.

CONS:

• We were ‘upgraded’ to a room on the 4th floor over Harbor Boulevard so while we had a view of the fireworks, the glass on the windows was weirdly cloudy or warped or something and it wasn’t exactly a great one, heh. Admittedly those aren’t really cons because it was a free ‘upgrade’, but I wouldn’t want to stay in one of those ‘park view’ rooms again. The noise from the road (and possibly the stairwell right by our room) was so bad that I barely got any sleep at all…which would be frustrating just about any time, but even more so when I only had about 6 hours TO sleep before getting up a little before 4 AM for the race.
• Granted, some of this was surely a problem of thin walls/improper window sealings/etc. But I’m pretty sure that if we’d been staying at the back of the hotel we at least wouldn’t have experienced the noisiness of Harbor Boulevard [being right outside our window].
• While the parking fee wasn’t too terrible, I don’t like that I had to hand over my keys in a valet-type situation for a parking situation where I could see my car in the lot. It was inconvenient, especially when we were putting stuff in the car for check-out purposes prior to heading over to Disneyland after I finished the race.

HALF MARATHON START

PROS:

• Many [non-Disney-owned and therefore somewhat cheaper] hotels were within <10 minutes walking distance of the half marathon corral staging area, including (as mentioned above} my own! So I was actually able to get at least 45 minutes’ more sleep 😀
• Because there were fewer people running the race as a whole, the corrals were of course smaller (numbers-wise) which meant that despite being in corral E *and* them starting about 5 minutes late, I crossed the start line at 5:33 AM. (Meaning even if they had started on time, I would have only waited 33 minutes instead of the 45 I waited the last time I was in corral E for a RunDisney half marathon…seemingly a million years ago, ha)

CONS:

• This might have been better served in a “pre-race planning” section, but as most of the info for that is never available until the race guide comes out fairly soon before the event, it seems a bit silly to separate it out. Essentially, they needed better-labeled maps in the race guide for where you could enter the staging areas. I had to compare (1) my pinpointed location in the maps app on my phone to (2) the map my partner brought up in Google maps to (3) the graphic in the race guide that only had the cross streets labeled just to figure out APPROXIMATELY how I could walk over to the staging area…and even then was [granted, pleasantly] surprised to walk out of my hotel on race morning and realize that the entry (which at this point had an A-frame sign pointing where to go) was between my hotel and the Tropicana hotel next door. So yeah, the ‘where to go’ maps for pre- and post-race were terrible, haha.
• *If* there were any pre-race photo ops or anything of the sort, they weren’t at all visible from where I entered the staging area, and as cast members were very pointedly directing everyone right to the corrals I didn’t feel comfortable wandering around to try to find any pre-race photo ops etc. that might exist :-/
• I will say that I saw posts in the big RunDisney Facebook group that the security lines to get into the staging area were terrible for the 10k. One person said they got in line for security at about 4:15 AM and I believe claimed they didn’t get through it until around 4:45 AM. Whatever the issues were for the 10K, they were either (a) for another entrance, (b) they fixed them before the half, OR (c) the security lines were just cleared out if you arrived a bit later, because I walked right through when I arrived at about 4:35 AM through the entrance between the Camelot and Tropicana on Harbor.

THE RACE ITSELF

PROS:

• Having experienced 4 previous RunDisney half marathons at WDW, the park portions of the course I ran often left a lot to be desired – the Princess Half is my personal least favorite course, because while sure! you get to run around Magic Kingdom!…the only other park (at least for the two I ran) was EPCOT and then only the front portion of it. So while there’s a lot to be said about the ‘meh’ organization of the Disneyland half marathon course, at the very least you got to run through a huge portion of both parks 🙂
• As for the rest of the course, in this section I’ll just say: hey it was kinda neat to run by the Ducks arena and Angels stadium?
• One thing I noticed that was really great was the number of spectators. I’m guessing the frequency of spectator groups along the course was due to so much of the course being on [fairly] easily accessible public property, versus at WDW where you can tell it’s really difficult for spectators to get to most portions of the course due to it all being on Disney roads and there not being publicly accessible side roads and parking lots. So as far as I can tell, if you want to cheer on a RunDisney racer, Disneyland is THE place for this! My amazing partner was even able to take a brief walk from our hotel to a spot on the last 0.1 mile of the course to support me 🙂

CONS: (Ohhh where to start.)

• While I admit that the logistics of a half marathon where most of the race has to be on public roads – meaning Disney has to work with the city of Anaheim, which was the reason the Disneyland races were put on hold from 2017 until now – have to be really difficult, the fact that most of the first mile of the race was on city streets, followed by miles 2, 3, and 4 in the parks, then hitting 5 as you exited Disneyland and spending the rest of the time on Anaheim roads…I don’t know, I expected it to be something like this, but it was still disappointing ::shrug::
• Despite being warned of the problems with bottlenecking, I don’t know that any number of warnings could have truly prepared me for how often they happened and how bad they really were. The absolute worst was at the first water station – I came around a corner at a run, in that ‘dodge and weave’ zone as I tried to keep the pace I wanted to keep (but was of course having trouble with because I was randomly placed in corral E after having not seen a corral below C for any Disney race since the WDW Marathon Weekend half in 2019)…and then BAM! had to quite literally skid to a stop because there was a dozens-of-people-deep crowd shuffling along as they tried to make it through an already narrow path made even more narrow – and slow! – by the fact that THIS was where they chose to place a water station?! Argh. And there was at least one other in-park water station placed about as terribly after that!
• I haven’t bothered to stop for a character photo op during a race for a long time. I don’t want to eat into my time by waiting in long lines, and the last time I stopped for a character that didn’t have much of a line the photopass person took two extremely blurry and unusable photos so it was a wash, anyway. Still, even I recognized that the character stops were often in odd places and badly lit to boot, making them really hard to notice – in fact, I ran by all but two of them and the rest of the ones that I DID see, I only realized after the fact that I had actually passed them by. While this might not be a big deal for ME, I’m frustrated on behalf of those who DO want to pause for photo ops.
• And it wasn’t just the character photo ops! The only race photogs who had their places well-lit and obvious were the ones shooting people coming out of the castle. Granted, these were for sure the most important ones, but yet again I ran by the rest of them and only realized was doing so when I saw that the people I was passing were hamming it up for a camera. And while this might have caused me to miss some of the photogs along the course, I still doubt there were many more than a half dozen of them total. In fact, there are just 8 total photos in my photopass account, and only TWO of them are actually from the course itself.
• Once we were out of the parks, no character stops, no course photogs, and I saw at least one person eat it BAD when they tripped over the white pavement markers in the center of the roads…not to mention reading numerous comments in the RunDisney Facebook group about others falling because of those, potholes, or railroad tracks. Thankfully for me the rest of the course was whatever because I was just trying to make up some of the time I’d lost in the park bottlenecks and while pausing for more photos than usual, and as previously mentioned the spectators were numerous and GREAT…plus it was neat to run by the Ducks arena and Angels stadium. But otherwise, meh, because at least with even the worst WDW courses, you get at least a bit of time in a park before that last tenth of a mile or so to the finish line.
• Some of the mile markers in the parks (including the much-panned mile 3 marker) were in bad places, for sure, but the mile 13 marker was an effing TRAVESTY. As awesome as the spectator situation was for the rest of the race, the fact that they didn’t block off an area around THE FINAL MILE MARKER was *terrible* planning/a really bad decision…and also really disappointing.

THE END/POST-RACE SITUATION

PROS:

• I was able to get back to my hotel room to get warm (because wow we had a cold snap here in CA and this was in the top 3 coldest RunDisney races I’ve ever run, of 11 total) in just a few minutes after exiting the post-race staging area…though let’s be real, this was entirely by chance, as I had no idea when I booked it that my hotel would be that close to the start/end point of the race. Sad to say, I legitimately have zero other pros for the post-race situation. So much so that I’m calling it a “situation” rather than an “experience”, ha.

CONS:

• Maybe other people have better photos, but I don’t have a single finish line picture that shows the finish arch.
• No merch tents. No food/drink options other than the Powerade, water bottle, banana, and snack box they hand out (WDW has food and drink carts). No character photo ops that I could find (this is the time I usually stop for them 🙁 ) Not even the little “I did it” signs to hold in front of the RunDisney backdrops. I felt bad that my partner got up to meet me at the end of the race because if I had known the post-race staging area would be this lame, I would have told him to stay in bed, heh. (Note: I do understand that the area they use for post-race staging is much smaller than what is available at WDW, but at least when I was there it wasn’t really crowded at all and it looked to me as if they definitely COULD have had some of the aforementioned things available.)

IN CONCLUSION…

My official time was 2:39:19 – my third best half marathon time (again, out of five half marathons, and by about 5 minutes, to boot)…which to be honest isn’t bad considering the bottlenecks and my extra photo stops. And this race did teach me something – to allow myself some grace: by actually stopping for some photos (since I had obviously never run through the Disneyland parks before), and by listening to my body, including making a restroom stop but even more importantly, pausing for some additional stretching when my left hip started feeling tight at around the 11.5 mile mark. These things all served as reminders that no race is ever the same, and no matter what, I’m still proud AF of what I accomplished – including finishing 2,959th of 11,186 runners 🙂

Would I do another RunDisney Disneyland race? Honestly, I don’t know. I’m not entirely ruling it out, but I do feel for the people who traveled from afar (vs. my 50-ish minute drive to Anaheim and one night in a hotel that, with parking, cost $300). I think that if you’re a HUGE RunDisney fan and you’ve never experienced a Disneyland race, it’s…let’s say mostly worth it. But to be completely honest, if I had been on the east coast and paid not just the race registration fee + 60 miles roundtrip in gas + one night at a hotel, but instead, the current insane flight prices + rental car or rideshare fees from an airport + more than one night in a hotel…I would have been less in the “I’m glad I had this experience” boat and more in the “why did I do this to myself” boat, heh.