Princess Half Marathon Weekend: An Expo Fit for Royalty
27 Feb
After dropping Molly Beagle off at doggie daycare, weighing in at Weight Watchers, and catching breakfast at Panera, Sara and I headed on over to the Princess Half Marathon expo located at Disney’s Coronado Springs. I used to work at Coronado on Disney’s College Program, so it was a blast from the past being there.
Our first stop was packet pick-up, located on the right side of the room, where they probably could have filled with more booths to ease up the congestion on the other side of the room.
After grabbing our bibs, we decided to pick up our shirts and “goodie bags”, which is usually a rather simple and painless process. Not this time! We entered what would be any fire marshal’s worst nightmare.
There was pushing, shoving, and elbowing, and absolutely no making any headway towards the front of the line… very reminiscent of an NSYNC concert in 1997. So, Sara somehow was able to get her shirt, but we decided to wait to get mine and headed to the Official Merchandise booth instead, which also had a 45-minute line wrapped back and forth.
These women MUST BUY ALL THE THINGS!
I couldn’t get over how many women were crammed into this booth and diving in to grab shirts, jackets, magnets, and coffee mugs. I grabbed a long-sleeved t-shirt and a cute little coffee mug. One can never have too many coffee mugs, no?
After dealing with the shoving and pushing of entitled “princesses”, Sara and I headed straight to the stage to catch the tail-end of Ali Vincent’s speech. She was the first female winner from the Biggest Loser, and one of my biggest inspirations and motivations. During her season, I would purposely go to the gym during the show so I could run on the treadmill while she was on the TV in front of me. After her speech, we followed her to her booth and actually got to chit-chat with her!
Once we were done making Ali our new bff, we finished up shopping at Raw Threads and Sweaty Bands
and then headed straight to the New Balance photo booth. How funny are these?
Many people on the Run Disney facebook page and Princess Half Marathon facebook groups have labeled this expo as the worst expo they’ve ever been to because of transportation, a change in location, and the over-crowdedness. I agree… only somewhat. I think a lot has to do with this race being the less serious of any of the Disney races. A lot of the participants don’t know what to expect at a race expo because this is their first race. It’s overwhelming to know where to go and what to see first. But, I will say that Run Disney planned the space out very poorly. The packet pick-up area was huge and empty while the other half of the room was jam packed with booths, lines for shirt pick-up, and lines to buy the Limited Edition Run Disney New Balance shoes. I also think a lot of people heard the horror stories about those shoes selling out so fast during the WDW Marathon Weekend and Tinkerbell Half, so they wanted to get to this expo super early, causing the expo to be super packed right from the beginning.
GREAT job, Andrea! I was suprised to see they actually had ropes for the merchandise line up in your photo… there was NO organization when my friend and I were there on Friday morning and the lines were just like seas of people coming from every direction… CRAZY! The line for the shoes was STUPID! I caught the first bus on Friday morning and was one of the first 50 people in the door… so many went straight to the left side to line up for those shoes that I had never even heard of, when I went to the right to grab my bib… not sure why they couldn’t put the bib IN the bag with your shirt, etc., to avoid having to cross the entire building to pick up our kits, but… whatever. We had a fantastic experience, overall, though, regardless, as it looks like you did, as well. Thanks for posting!
I cannot wait to read your race re-cap!
I went to the expo Saturday afternoon – still a lot of people, but the longest my group waited for t-shirts was about 5 minutes. The room at Coronado was only a little smaller than last year’s (which was at Wide World of Sports), but I found it to be an easier experience because the bib pick-up last year was in a totally different building than the expo itself.
The only transportation foul up I noticed was the ridiculously long line for the Downtown Disney bus – we ended up taking the Saratoga bus, then hitching a ride with the boat there to cross the lake and get to Downtown. Probably faster that way, too.
I went to the Expo on Saturday, and while there were a fair amount of people, I went right up to get my shirt and didn’t have to wait long at all for my bib! The booths were very close together, though. I agree that they should have used some of the space near packet pick-up to alleviate some of the congestion.