I’m going to preface this by saying I’ve been doing runDisney races for 10 years now, I’ve seen a lot of good and bad over that time and this is just my honest personal feedback about this weekend. I do plan on sending feedback to runDisney (and encourage others to do the same) so that hopefully they can gather all the information they need from us athletes about the running events returning.

The good: I absolutely loved the 5K and the 10K courses. I would run that 10K course a million times. I was in corral A for both the 5K and 10K so I do understand my views could be different than others. I loved seeing the locals out on the streets of Anaheim for the half- seeing everyone who came out with their cars at Angel Stadium and the party at the Honda Center were huge course highlights for me. The volunteers and cast members were great- I’ll go into more detail below about this, but I think they were all doing the best they could with what they were given. I’ll always be thankful for these people coming out as course support. I love the medals and although the Coast to Coast isn’t my favorite design, I’m still proud of earning it.

The not so good: Unfortunately this is going to be rather lengthy. First, the digital guide was lacking a lot of info. Especially for the 5K. It felt incomplete and unhelpful compared to the WDW race guides. The lack of signage the entire weekend was strange. For how many different directions people are walking from to get to all the different events, there was no direction. If I did see a sign, which was rare, it was very small and hard to see and there was no one out directing people. I had several people stop me on the street when I had my expo bag or a race shirt on asking me where to go. I know on the courses, there were a lot of bottlenecks that came up, I personally didn’t experience them but from a few videos I saw they looked extremely bad and borderline dangerous. The half course had a lot of uneven pavement, small potholes, reflectors, etc. and I saw quite a few people fall. I hated the way they started the corrals, they need to do small waves instead of letting everyone go at once and I don’t think that was helping with the course crowding. The staging area at the races was really disappointing. I understand it’s a much smaller area, but the stage was tiny, there was no food or beverage options or characters, and it overall wasn’t a place to really hang out for long at. This is a personal opinion, but they should’ve brought the full host team out from the East Coast. Carissa was carrying the entire thing. I did enjoy Tetris and think he should’ve been the co-host, but the vibes were lacking with her and Starkey. He seems like a great announcer but I missed the playful banter between her and John Pelkey. I don’t think a lot of the cast members and volunteers were well informed about the details of this weekend. I saw people complaining that they’d ask someone something and they wouldn’t know the answer. And for that, I blame leadership and the race directors for not relaying all necessary information. And finally, my absolute biggest gripe was that almost nothing was running on time. The 5K race entry and race start were both late, the 10K security line was late opening, the half corral openings were late opening and the half marathon was extremely late starting. It really became frustrating that nothing was running on schedule. There were big issues on the 10K day with people making it into corrals at the last second because of how long it took. I was in line at 3:30 and the line was extremely long, I can only imagine how long it actually got by the time they finally started letting us in. I didn’t love having to stand in line down S Harbor at zero dark thirty because there were some people on the streets that were I think making some of us a little nervous- especially the guy that was very strung out yelling at people walking by, who also was trying to fight people later that day. Luckily there were enough runners around that i don’t think anything would’ve happened, but it was uncomfortable.

Overall, I’m happy that runDisney is returning to the West Coast. There was an overwhelming sense of excitement because of it. And I’m absolutely willing to give them grace with this weekend being the return and having kinks that need worked out. This whole weekend just felt very thrown together and not well thought out. I would’ve expected the opposite and because it was the return of races, they would’ve been completely on top of it trying to make it perfect. I’m not someone who likes to find things to complain about and by no means am I saying that every other runDisney race weekend goes off perfectly, but this weekend was not entirely the runDisney that a lot of us know. I’m going to cross my fingers that they listen to feedback and apply it to future events. And for now, I’m probably going to skip the west coast events until they smooth out those kinks.