Jed Christiansen's Staging Area

It’s hard to beat finishing a half-marathon at the 50-yard line at the Rose Bowl! The atmosphere was great, crowds were solid. The course was moderately challenging, and it was all pretty well organized. (The corral system seemed to work a lot better than many races!)

This race is on one of the most beautiful stretches of road anywhere; it’s absolutely gorgeous!

But OMG the wind nearly broke me! (The ~5% incline for 2 miles straight into 20-30mph headwinds, specifically.) Make no mistake, this is a difficult course. I would guess on the order of 10 miles of the 21-miler race were into strong headwinds. There’s also virtually no spectators because of the nature of the road, but the organizers definitely make up for it by having a bunch of musicians along the course, including the famous piano player at Bixby Bridge and the taiko drummers on the road to Hurricane Point.

Swag is solid, and the finisher medal is a clay/ceramic medal on a leather lanyard, so definitely unique. Be prepared for a 3am wakeup to make the 4am buses to the start lines.

All in all, while it was a challenging course, I enjoyed doing it. Definitely need more strength work to try it again!

This is a beautiful course, and everything was well-organized.

Biggest gripe was that shuttles started loading early (5:15am-ish) and got to the start around 5:45/6am for a 7am start. Luckily you could wait on the bus as long as you wanted, but I would have preferred the chance to save a bit of sleep. 🙂

There was a single corral for the half-marathon, which I thought could mean everyone was bunched up, but it was no problem at all. For the first part of the race the road is effectively 4 lanes wide so there was plenty of space.

I really enjoyed the race – it was definitely a great experience.