Becca C's Staging Area

I’ve done this race twice, once in 2024 and once in 2026. Both times there were easily preventable issues that clearly came from poor organization.

The first year I did it, we ordered our packets to be mailed to us, only to have them send us the wrong packets in a giant mix up that seemed to have impacted everybody who got their packets mailed. The only way to sort it out was to wait forever on race day to get your packet picked up then. They also did not refund the (overpriced) cost of shipping, despite this disatorous mixup.

Both years there was an issue of not being able to tell where to line up, and not having enough speakers for people to clearly hear where to go. This leads to the wave starts being very jumbled and confusing, with waves blending together before you even begin due to the issues ahead, so from the start you’ll be weaving quite a lot more than necessary.

The course itself is poorly thought out, with an accidental mud pit from the course organizers planning a run through recently watered grass. But then you have 1000 people running through it and it’s just a mud pit, that is not marked on the course maps. There was also a ~1 mile gravel section that was also not marked on the map, that you do twice since the course loops. I’d also recommend the race organizers extend the distance a bit of the first half, so that you can skip having a decent sized hill in the literal last mile of a half marathon. It was sad seeing a lot of people who had been running the whole time just hit a wall on the hill and start walking right at the end.

Race photographers did not capture photos of me or the two other people I knew who ran. The best shot we got was one of us in the background of somebody else’s photo, completely out of focus. I looked the one photographer they had at the finish line right in the eye and watched them not take my photo or anybody else’s photo around me. We scrolled the entire photo gallery to see if maybe we had photos of ourselves that they did not tag. We did not, except for the blurry background shot mentioned above.

The finish line becomes a bottleneck due to poor planning. It’s a narrow finish, and then the medal hand out areas aren’t going fast enough to prevent this. There’s also no clear signage to delineate where to go at this point (the half marathon had a different area than the 5k/10k to go to), which also adds to the bottleneck since people get confused.

There was only one water/banana station at the end so if you wanted, you could wait 20+ minutes to get water. Neat.

At mile 10, a random volunteer stopped me to ask if I was running in the half marathon. I have genuinely no idea why this happened because my bib was clearly visible and I was running normally? She did not apologize for stopping me either, and was fairly rude. If this lady reads this, you should not volunteer for these types of events anymore. Stopping somebody that far in is just awful.

Overall at this point, I like the idea of this race, but get the impression that the organizers must not run much themselves, and do not care to improve the race, since they consistently have the same issue every year (based on my experience and reading other reviews) that are not common in other races by other organizations.

As far as the cherry blossoms go, they planned this race too late in the season this year so the trees were all past peak cherry blossom viewing.

Also the shirts are always hideous.