Judy Scavino's Staging Area

Course was challenging for me since I’m from flat Florida: some grass, some hills, some pavement, but the difficulty for me was on the cinder roads: hard to get traction and wore out my hamstrings. Super friendly staff and all other runners so kind. Excellent medals and shirts, fun expo photo ops, beautiful area to run.

This is a nice little local race at Al Lopez Park. The swag and production are light and the entry fee is low but the point is to raise funds for Meb’s Foundations so it’s a win all around. Meb posed for pictures with anyone and as the coolest thing ever, he started last and then ran up along side people and took selfies with you while he was running with you! So fun! I DNF’d for the first time ever because the 10K was very poorly signed (you do several loops and the loops aren’t the same) so I ended up accidentally cutting the course short and had them remove my time because I didn’t want to take a medal away from someone who deserved it! No matter. It’s the runners responsibility to know the course and the point here was to fundraise for a good cause and Meb was awesome.

Pretty course that starts and ends in downtown Jacksonville
Small but nice expo for packet pickup
There are several hotels in walking distance to the start that were reasonably priced

Nice spinner medal with dangling charm
Nice Tervis tumbler cup at the finish line
Pretty and very flat course
T-shirts ran very big, but they told you they ran small when you registered, so everyone upsized and then ended up with shirts that were too big.
Good mimosa’s at the end and nice free giveaways from local grocery store, but there wasn’t much post race food. It was Carraba’s and Outback: in the past at other races, we had lots of food from them, but this time you just got a tiny scoop of chicken marsala or steak. It was really good, but that was all the food they had, other than post race banana and apple.

I’m from flat Florida, so this had considerable rolling hills for a FL girl, but nice scenery on roads or through a park with a wide paved trail.
Packet pick up is just that–nothing but pick up your bib and shirt. However, take the time to go to the hot air balloon festival after you get your packet and they have fun give-aways at the festival. The balloons are 100% dependent on the weather, so if it is windy or rainy, they don’t inflate them. Lots of food trucks with food for purchase at the festival. Post race, they had scrambled eggs and bacon and muffins. While I appreciate the effort of the volunteers, they were the worst eggs I’ve ever had. :-0 I did manage to place in my age group and it was fun that they had “Miss Texas” on hand to present the awards. The guy who runs the race is very kind and let me defer my race from 2018 to 2019, as I had a broken bone in 2018. Nice looking shirts and medals.

Expo was great: lots of give-aways!
Course was flat and very few turns. Advertised as a downhill race but to me, it didn’t seem like much of a downhill.
LOTS of water stations and Offerpad had the funniest signs: I wish I had time to stop and take pics of them as they were great!
Post race party was AWESOME and again, lots of give-aways.

-This is a very popular race. I have done it twice and I live in the Tampa area.
-AWESOME race medal
-Various distances offered over the weekend so you can get extra medals and extra goodies. Beware–challenge jackets are usually horribly ugly!
-Expensive race compared to other races
-Lots of runners so expect to be in a bottleneck the first 2-3 miles.
-Flat course
-Lots of volunteers and crowds