Valerie Barker's Staging Area

This was a very well organized race. It’s my first Rock ‘n’ Roll race, so maybe they are all like this, but I appreciated the number of water stations, fuel stations, course marking, entertainment, etc. The only issue I had was the corral loading process was disorganized but that was mostly because the participants were not following the organizer’s directions.

The course is basically just an out and back, but because it’s on the LV strip at night, it’s a fun course. I will say it is challenging to have a race at 4:30 p.m. on Sunday after a weekend in Vegas! Some of the casino/resorts got involved with signage during the race, which was fun. Lots of good cheering along the course in the main part of the strip. It dwindled as we ran further north, but still some spectators.

Shout out to the LV police and city. They did a great job blocking all the streets and making the runners feel safe. At pretty much every intersection, the police had parked a city bus or tractor/trailer at the intersection, so there was no way a car could get through onto the course.

The Good Life Halfsy was a decently organized race. The start line didn’t have corrals, everyone lined up based on pace. This worked well and people seemed to line up where they should be. There were several water stops along the way and I noticed a lot of portable bathrooms as well.

There were spectators along most of the route and some cheer stations with music (both live and recorded).

The course is a net downhill, but there are hills along the way. Most of the hills are in the first 5 miles, but the last one is right at the end of mile 12 where we had to run uphill to get to a pedestrian bridge over the highway. It was brutal (at least for me), but the finish line was right at the end of the downhill coming off the other side, so it made me feel like I had a fast finish!

I chose to run this race for my Oklahoma half marathon because I graduated from Oklahoma State University. It was fun to run through campus, by my old apartment, and around Boomer Lake. The course has some sneaky hills and since it is Oklahoma, it may be windy!

The volunteers were very friendly and they had several water stops. My biggest complaint is that there were not bathrooms where the pre-race materials said there would be. There were several port-a-potties at the start (plenty for the size of the race) and the existing bathrooms at Boomer Lake (though at least one of those said “closed for the season”). Other than that, I didn’t see any port-a-potties on course. I passed by the options at the lake because there was supposed to be an option at mile 9 but when I asked the volunteer at the aid station, he said that the port-a-potty hadn’t been delivered. So my recommendation in the future is more bathroom options or at least to tell participants that there are not any available.

Otherwise nice, small race.

The race support at the Mississippi Gulf Coast Half is great. They had aid stations at every mile with a couple port-o-potties, water, and power aid. I know they had Gu at some stations as well, but I didn’t pay attention to that because I had my own fuel. The medal at the end is really cute as well (a sea turtle).

There is not much in the way of crowd support. Very few people cheering. The course is flat and straight, but this year had a lot of wind, sometimes a headwind to make it challenging. The course also was about 0.1 miles too long. Since it didn’t have any turns, I don’t think my watch was off that much and I saw others talking about it too.

Packet pickup was super smooth. Nice t-shirt and not a lot of junk in the bag that I’m just going to throw away.

Overall, I recommend this race.

This course is nice with good views of the city. Because most of it is on the lakeside trail, it gets pretty crowded. It was the worst the first couple miles and then again after the turn around because other runners were on their way out. There was also a bottleneck where the 10k race joined back up.

Packet pickup was also a somewhat disappointing. I waited in line for 75 minutes.

Swag was good. Nice medal, a reusable bag, and shirt. I appreciated that there weren’t a lot of flyers that I would just throw away.

The course is mostly flat, so it’s good for a PR as long as you can get separated from other runners or get with others running your pace.