Cole Ramirez's Staging Area

The shirts are good. I actually like the participator shirt better than the finisher shirt. The neck hole on the finisher shirt is bizarrely small. I’m a normal sized woman. It should not be hard to get this shirt over my head and around my neck. But I digress – I don’t run for the shirts.

The course is ok. I only ran the half, so I didn’t get to experience the part around the lake, which I know is beautiful because I’ve run other races around it. The half is mostly in downtown with part through the bordering neighborhoods. Dallas is pretty ugly so I liked the neighborhood stretches the best. There are some hills throughout but I wouldn’t personally call this a hilly course.

There is water/gatorade every other mile but I think the nutrition could definitely be offered more frequently. For the half, the only gels are on mile 8. Apparently there was supposed to be gels at the start, but I never saw any.

The spectator support is great in the neighborhoods (a contributing factor to why I liked those stretches best), but there’s not a lot in the way of race entertainment otherwise. I’m comparing it to Cowtown I guess, where there is entertainment almost every mile for the entire half.

The big issue, and the reason I would hesitate to run Dallas BMW again, is the corral organization. There are only 4 corrals, and corral A contains people running 5:00 pace to 10:00+ pace. There is no organization by time within the corral. I spent the first two miles dodging runners going 12 minutes per mile. I did so much weaving in the first two miles that my half marathon race actually ended up being 13.5 miles! Dallas needs to figure out a better way to do this. Corral A should be separated into 5-6 different corrals with tighter pace ranges.

Lastly, this race is EXPENSIVE. It’s the most expensive race I’ve ever run (including my fulls!) and I just don’t think it was worth the premium cost. Next fall I’ll probably go back to running DRCs the half and stick with the Cowtown full (which I do highly recommend!! A great course!!).

This is an exciting route through the Stockyards, downtown, and beautiful Fort Worth neighborhoods. There are a couple of small hills, but nothing excessive. Texas is pretty flat, remember.

For the first half, the race entertainment was ON POINT. They had music every half mile or so and the roads were lined with cheering spectators. How motivating! This all came to a grinding halt when the half marathon folks split off and start making their way back to the finish. From that point on, there were a few neighborhoods who organized block parties to cheer us on and offer refreshments (fruit, candy, fireball) and there was a water/gatorade stand every mile, but other than that, nuthin. It felt so sad, after those first 10 miles of noise, distraction, and encouragement! There may have been 1-2 musicians on the second half, but no big bands like there were for the half marathon. I guess most people run with headphones anyway, but I wasn’t, and I’ll admit to losing some steam without the musical pick me up every few minutes.

The water and gatorade stations were plentiful, as were the bathrooms. I thought they could have had more stations with food, and I would have preferred an alternative to the gooey stuff (like mini cliff bars?). Thankfully multiple neighborhoods had their own refreshment tables set up and offered bananas, oranges, etc. How thoughtful of them!

The other thing I really appreciated was the memorial to fallen heroes on the bridge to downtown. There were hundreds of people holding flags and probably an entire mile lined with the faces of those who’d been lost. It gave me the chills! One of my favorite parts of the run, for sure.

Overall, a really fun race. This was my first Cowtown and I hope to return next year to run it again!