Travis Shope's Staging Area

I was looking forward to this one for months, but was sorely let down. Expo wasn’t too bad. There was a long line before the opening, and the doors were opened a few minutes late, but oh well. A weird verification system where you picked up your bib and then had to wait in ANOTHER line for your chip to be scanned electronically. First time I encountered this in 22 marathons. No shirts, you get them after you finish. Lots of merchandise at the expo. Race morning called for rain but moved out before race time. The start was a complete mess. 2 lanes were to start: one one side elites, then the next fastest corral. In the other lane, the 2 slowest corrals. For whatever ridiculous reason, the police were trying to move people from the one side to the other saying you can’t block the road. It was already blocked from the back!! So in other words, get out of a blocked road. ??? Therefore, almost didn’t make it to the back of the corral. I knew i was too far back when a million phones appeared to take picture of the fireworks. And no checking of anyone in the corrals. When the gun went off, you had BOTH LANES starting at once, no waves, no nothing. So you had 5 hour plus runners starting with elites! Completely nuts. To add to the mess, 10k runners were in same corrals. Tons of walkers bowing up in front of you to take selfies. It was dark, so people were running into each other. The course itself isn’t easy. Most people, like myself, were simply not acclimated to the temps so we were all dropping like flies in 76 degrees and 95 percent humidity. When we finally got to the finish line, you got the medal, showers (which were nice), then from there a complete maze. Go one way to get your shirt, go one way to buy merch (who carries a debit card on a marathon?), and then put a search party out to find ANYTHING to eat! A banana and some small muffin. Then people had no idea how to get out of the finish area. The best part was the lines based on shirt sizes to get your shirt. Overall it was a disorganized mess. I have a hard time believing any experienced marathon was included in organizing this. If you have to get your 50 states in, you don’t have much of a choice. For a destination marathon, choose something else.