M L's Staging Area

First marathon, but many HMs, 10ks, 5ks under my belt. This is the largest city race I’ve participated in.

Pros: beautiful and scenic, coolest summer marathon you’ll find, lots of aid stations, runner route diversions were smooth, beautiful medal that comes with a little pin, before race week – customer service was responsive and great.

This is a hilly, but beautiful course. For the price and prestige as a big city marathon, I expected it to be better organized. It starting coming off as a bit of a money grab as time went on. We registered early so it was roughly $200, and I’m starting to feel like it wasn’t worth it! Definitely not worth the $300ish if you register later.

– The expo is run mostly by volunteers. They seem like students getting volunteer hours, which is totally fine! But they didn’t know who to ask to answer questions.

– Pacing groups were all over the place. There was no information about which corral pacers would stand in. In the last corral, I only spotted 2 pacing groups, of the 18 listed. Later on, I see on instagram that they had a 5:30 pacing group, which was not listed. So not sure how many groups there actually were.

– Lots of people looking for gear check at the start line. Luckily, did not need to check a bag. But it was not clearly communicated where to find it.

– Marathon had plenty of porta-potties at the start. But the first HM did not. As I ran by, heard tons of people talking about peeing in the bushes and alleyways. It impacted the first 5-8 aid stations after we passed the HM start line. Every single one had huge huge lines.

– On the GGB’s tiny sidewalk, the fastest half marathon runners have to compete for space with the slower marathon runners. And the lead bike! Some information about the courses crossing and to stay in lanes would be nice. Lots of elbows and jabbing for space.

– At the finish line, runners were confused about where to redeem their free beverage ticket for a free drink. Not sure if there were even drinks available. We went home.

– The “virtual goodie bag” sent out after had nothing included. The t-shirt we purchased separately isn’t great quality. All in all, these are extras. But this marathon and the extra swag is costly, so quality is expected.

We probably will not run this again because of this organizational nightmare. Very little communication as the race approached, EXCEPT to send merch purchasing details, or signing up for next year etc.