My husband and I ran in the Food & Wine Disney Half Marathon, and I here’s what I {HONESTLY} thought about it. I love Disney, and I have always wanted to run in a Disney Half Marathon Race. I really wanted to run in the Disney Princess half marathon, but with my husband running with me I thought the Food & Wine Race would be better. I just googled and found out that men are allowed to run in the Disney Princess Half Marathon, as well. SO, that is a future option for me! I always just thought it was for Women since that is 90 percent of the participants.
This Disney’s Food & Wine Half Marathon was my fourth half marathon. I am not a fast (or good?) runner, but I enjoy having a training schedule and race to keep me motivated to exercise. I have ran twice in Portland, Oregon and once in College Station, TX. I am sorry to say that this was my least favorite race I have run so far. Maybe, it was because at Disney they don’t have all the locals standing along the race with homemade signs cheering you on.
Here were some of my issues. I wanted to love this race; I really did. Maybe my expectations were set too high!
1.Most of the race is on backlots and freeways
I was looking forward to running through the Disney theme parks when no one was there. We ran through Animal Kingdom, but it felt like just a very small amount of time. That was definitely my favorite part of the race! The race finished in Epcot, but we really just ran through the entrance and guests were starting to enter the park, and by that point I was just ready to finish the race! Running on freeways and concrete had some inclines and was very hot at times. Disney sets up places to take pictures with characters and had music playing but it felt very spread out between the entertainment set-ups. I need distractions when I am running 13.1 miles! I also don’t really like to stop and wait in a line for a character photo during a race. Once I start running, I am scared to stop!
2. The race area was too small.
I felt like the lanes to run did not accommodate the number of runners well. I spent too much energy zigging and zagging between people or trying not to bump people. I don’t like the idea of bumping into runners as I don’t want myself or someone else to be injured, and I felt like it was easy to bump into other runners during the race. I thought further into the race there would be more space, but I still thought it was too tight at the halfway point.
3. The Race took over the weekend
We just came to run the Race for a long weekend, so when we arrived we had to rush to the Disney Wide World of Sports to pick-up our Half Marathon Race Passes, then we had to make it to our dining reservation to make sure we had a good pre-race meal. We wanted to get to bed early as the shuttle pick-up was around 4AM before the Race. Once we were dropped off, we sat around for almost 2 hours before we actually ran. Then, after the Race we had to walk slowly and take a nap in the room to recover a little from the early race morning. It just felt like so much of our Disney Weekend revolved around Race Prep.
I had really built up running a Half-Marathon at Disney World, but I felt a little disappointed after this Food & Wine one. I could still see trying out the Princess Half Marathon in the future, but I could see myself running into similar issues. I think if I did it again, I might not worry as much about the meal the night before and take an Uber to the race location in the morning and maybe tag on some extra days at the park.
