If You are Going to Jump at the Finish Line, Be Sure You Stick the Landing – A 2018 Dopey Run TR

I’ve only done one race weekend (PHM 2015), and I did the 5k, too. I absolutely loved watching the sunrise in Epcot - what a way to start the weekend! Also, it was right after Frozen came out, so the only music was different versions of Ler It Go. I hope it was more varied for you.
 
Yay! 5K day! What a super fun race! Great pics!! You two are such a cute couple!

Aw thanks! We had so much fun.

Reading all these trip reports of the races makes me cold :sad2:

The 5k looks like so much fun! I’d love to run Epcot in the dark, I may just have to one of these years.

I wonder if that lady really did change closthes each mile of the half? That seems time consuming...

Love all of your pics! Looks like you guys had a blast!

I would highly recommend a race that runs through Epcot in the dark. It was amazing! The lady said it was mostly different light weight sparkle skirts that she had rolled up tight and in a backpack and then she had layered a bunch of shirts and tanks.

Your phone booth shots are hilarious!! How FUN!


That is the most wonderful, craziest thing I have ever heard! I wonder if she actually did it??!!


This is the best part of the 5K for me too. Epcot is beautiful in the dark!

We figure we'll make our own fun along with the on course entertainment. :D Luckily Chris is a very good sport.

Looks like you two had a great time!

Chris told me about that lady at Hurricane Hannahs. I then talked to someone after the half and said they saw her doing it!

1 done 3 to go!

Well, I guess we know she did it! She was a fast runner from the way she talked so I guess she had the time to do it.

3 to go indeed!

YES! Running through a dark Epcot is justue best!!

Smart to bring the blankets and the hand warmers, Chris is such a trooper for carrying them in that backpack!

You know...the character lines during the 5K are so annoying but it never occurred to me to just other pics around Epcot - love the phone booth ones! You guys are so smart!

Poor Horace. People just must not know who he is. :sad2:

We felt crazy carting all that warm stuff around, but boy were we happy to have it. Poor Horace indeed, but like I said, it was good for us with a short line. :D

I’ve only done one race weekend (PHM 2015), and I did the 5k, too. I absolutely loved watching the sunrise in Epcot - what a way to start the weekend! Also, it was right after Frozen came out, so the only music was different versions of Ler It Go. I hope it was more varied for you.

You know I'm having a hard time remembering what was playing. I know I remember How Far I'll Go from Moana and I seem to recall it was a variety of songs, but it's all sort of a happy blur at this point.
 
We really did enjoy Poly, but not sure I'm a convert. I think we liked Beach Club better. The monorail wasn't as advantageous as I thought it would be to be honest. BUT, we also were not there under the best weather circumstances, so if it were warm and we had more time and opportunity to enjoy the resort (hang out on the beach or in the pool and eat more Dole Whips), then I might have a different opinion of it.
We had a lot of issues with the monorail this trip too. The best thing about the Poly is that you don't have to switch monorails going or coming from Epcot. That added a lot of time.

Glad you survived the expo madness! As a first-time Dopey (like you guys) I don't have any experience with going to the expo on Wednesday but if it's never been like this before it'd be interesting to see a repeat Dopey speculate where runDisney fell short. Interesting that so far I haven't seen anyone have any suggestions on what went wrong!
1. They increased the variety of runDisney Merchandise (whoohoo!) while effectively decreasing there capacity by going from two Disney Merch areas to 1.
Last year runDisney Merchandise was in both buildings. Not only did it reduce the load it also made sure everyone went into the building with the other vendors.
2. Signage was really lacking and the people directing seemed like things needed to be better thought out. They didn't have marked queues set up outside indicating bib pick up lines. They had that last year. The entrance to prepurchased merchandise was indicated well and they didn't have an organized queue setup for the Merchandise line. They did little to try and prevent people from jumping into line with people that were crossing the road when they were called into the building.

I'm just not sure what prompted them to change things. I felt like it went pretty smoothly in years past. I knew the 5K was a cotton shirt, but was honestly surprised at how huge it was.
This is my fourth or 5th MW 5k and I have yet to wear one of those shirts. I wish they would make them gender specific tech t's and then I'd get some use out of them.

Yeah, I'm not sure why it was so much worse. I don't know if separating out the official merchandise from the other vendors was part of the problem. I wonder if having it in the same building as the bib pickup was the problem? Maybe there was a capacity issue or something in that building. I seem to recall they would have a little official merchandise in the same building as pickup, but that the majority was in the main vendor area. That might have split up those shoppers some between two buildings? I don't know really, but my biggest beef was just poor communication and signage. It was difficult to figure out where you needed to go and what line you needed to stand in.
Agreed... Disney knows how to do lines, look at FOP. I have no idea why they messed this up so bad.

It's Disney so it's the perfect place to be all about Grey stuff.
 
I saw that girl with the Up costume shortly after mile 1 of the marathon! Great costume but I couldn’t imagine carrying that for 26 miles!

Jiminy Cricket was one of the two character stops that I regretted not stoping for that weekend. Had a short line for Horace myself!
 


Yay for the 5K! So fun to meet y’all in real life! Love love your pics around world showcase! I was too cold/lazy to take my phone out for pics that day (or any day until the marathon).
 


Your 5k experience sounds super fun! I admittedly called Horace Clarence when he first got in line for his stop. :blush: I dunno, Clara...Clarence...it just made sense haha! It's funny because I heard someone behind me do it too!

I saw the costume change lady during the half! She was squatting down at the mile 5 marker digging into her back up- didn't really get what she was doing at the time until I saw someone post about her afterwards. Would be interesting to know what all her costumes were- it wasn't a very big back pack so interested to hear how she worked that one out!

1. They increased the variety of runDisney Merchandise (whoohoo!) while effectively decreasing there capacity by going from two Disney Merch areas to 1.
Last year runDisney Merchandise was in both buildings. Not only did it reduce the load it also made sure everyone went into the building with the other vendors.
2. Signage was really lacking and the people directing seemed like things needed to be better thought out. They didn't have marked queues set up outside indicating bib pick up lines. They had that last year. The entrance to prepurchased merchandise was indicated well and they didn't have an organized queue setup for the Merchandise line. They did little to try and prevent people from jumping into line with people that were crossing the road when they were called into the building.

Interesting take! I forgot that you used to be able to get runDisney merch in the same building as bib pick up. Hopefully they learn from this and reorganize for next year.
 
Great pics! I almost stopped for some phone booth photos too, but had a hard time getting to them with the crowd.

I saw the woman with the UP costume in the first couple of miles of the marathon too. I didn't realize she was cutting a balloon off at each mile marker, I thought she was cutting them ALL off thinking she had made a costume mistake, LOL.
 
We had a lot of issues with the monorail this trip too. The best thing about the Poly is that you don't have to switch monorails going or coming from Epcot. That added a lot of time.


1. They increased the variety of runDisney Merchandise (whoohoo!) while effectively decreasing there capacity by going from two Disney Merch areas to 1.
Last year runDisney Merchandise was in both buildings. Not only did it reduce the load it also made sure everyone went into the building with the other vendors.
2. Signage was really lacking and the people directing seemed like things needed to be better thought out. They didn't have marked queues set up outside indicating bib pick up lines. They had that last year. The entrance to prepurchased merchandise was indicated well and they didn't have an organized queue setup for the Merchandise line. They did little to try and prevent people from jumping into line with people that were crossing the road when they were called into the building.

This is my fourth or 5th MW 5k and I have yet to wear one of those shirts. I wish they would make them gender specific tech t's and then I'd get some use out of them.


Agreed... Disney knows how to do lines, look at FOP. I have no idea why they messed this up so bad.


It's Disney so it's the perfect place to be all about Grey stuff.

Yeah, I agree that consolidating all the official merchandise in one location didn't help things. I have to think it impacted the other vendors as well since they weren't getting as much traffic I suspect. And, yes, the whole mess of that big pickup line just baffles me. It really looked to me like participants had just figured out how to make the switchback line work on their own. Crazy.

I saw that girl with the Up costume shortly after mile 1 of the marathon! Great costume but I couldn’t imagine carrying that for 26 miles!

Jiminy Cricket was one of the two character stops that I regretted not stoping for that weekend. Had a short line for Horace myself!

We saw here around there in the marathon as well. I've got a picture for later in the report. It looked like it wasn't working out according to plan, but i give her a lot of credit for trying to make it work. It was an ingenious idea.

Yay for the 5K! So fun to meet y’all in real life! Love love your pics around world showcase! I was too cold/lazy to take my phone out for pics that day (or any day until the marathon).

It really was sooooo cold. I was struggling getting my phone in and out as well and then Chris finally reminded me I had a zipper pocket in my shirt that made it easier.

Oh that 5K looks like a blast! I love how much fun you two have together! (#howtodomarriage)

Chris is such a good sport. He's always willing to do whatever silly thing I can think up and he even thinks up some of it himself now!

Your 5k experience sounds super fun! I admittedly called Horace Clarence when he first got in line for his stop. :blush: I dunno, Clara...Clarence...it just made sense haha! It's funny because I heard someone behind me do it too!

I saw the costume change lady during the half! She was squatting down at the mile 5 marker digging into her back up- didn't really get what she was doing at the time until I saw someone post about her afterwards. Would be interesting to know what all her costumes were- it wasn't a very big back pack so interested to hear how she worked that one out!



Interesting take! I forgot that you used to be able to get runDisney merch in the same building as bib pick up. Hopefully they learn from this and reorganize for next year.

WE sort of looked for her during the half but never saw her. I'd love to see some pictures of her various outfits. She was super nice and seemed pretty excited about it. When we first stopped for Horace, I thought it was Clarabelle and didn't realize it was him until we were up at the front of the line!

Just joining in. Enjoying it (I’m on page 2 hehe)

Welcome!

Wow. That doesn’t make me want to go to the expo. (I dream of doing the 5k during the princess weekend)

I've gone to the expo many times and while there are lines and it's crowded, it's never been like that before, so hopefully they learn from this experience and fix things back up to the way it used to be. I bet the 5k during Princess weekend would be great!

No end photo? That sucks

It wasn't until I started doing this report that I realized we didn't have one. My bib was all crumpled up at the end, but Chris' should have been visible. Who knows??

Great pics! I almost stopped for some phone booth photos too, but had a hard time getting to them with the crowd.

I saw the woman with the UP costume in the first couple of miles of the marathon too. I didn't realize she was cutting a balloon off at each mile marker, I thought she was cutting them ALL off thinking she had made a costume mistake, LOL.

We got lucky and were on that side coming up to the phone booths, so it was pretty easy to stop there and we just had to wait a minute for someone else who was getting pictures. The Up lady was definitely have difficulties when we saw her and when we saw her later in the race, things had really gone awry.
 
The Long Way to MK and Fueling Up for the 10K
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After we got back to the Poly, we both got cleaned up (and warmed up) and bundled up all over again to head out for MK. My original plan had been to get there at 9:00 which was originally park open, but they had extended hours to an 8:00 AM park open. Oh well, we were just going to have fun and not worry a lot about a commando park schedule. We were still looking good though to get to the park right around 9:00, so we happily headed out for the monorail expecting to be at MK in a very short time.

Unfortunately as we approached the monorail platform, we saw a CM turning people away saying the monorail was down. BOO!! So, we were trying to decide the best way to get to MK and opted to just walk to TTC and maybe the express monorail would be running or we could catch the ferry. Great idea, right? So, we walked over in the cold to find an absolute ZOO at TTC. We went ahead and got through bag check only to find an insane line waiting for the ferry (all the monorails were apparently down), and I told Chris to just forget it. We'd walk back to Poly and find a different way.

We walked BACK to Poly and headed to the bus stop where we got lucky to have an MK bus pull up after just a few minutes. The drive to the park was relatively quick, but we had to go through bag check yet AGAIN, and then a long wait to get through the entrance. But, persistence paid off and 1 HOUR after leaving the Polynesian, we finally entered MK. PHEW! Good thing our resort was so close. ;)



It was a beautiful blue sky day, but still very cold!



With our freshly earned 5K medals, it seemed like the perfect time to get a picture with the mascot for the race.


After our Pluto pics, we headed off for our first FP+ - Pirates!



Last time seeing the redhead in that particular outfit. I know that's a controversial move for many people, but I'm okay with it. I appreciate the classic nature of the ride, but evolving the rides is also okay by me. I'll be curious to see how the new scene works once it's completed. Chris' favorite ride was next - Haunted Mansion!


[URL='https://flic.kr/p/225TBag']By the time we finished up there and browsed a bit in Memento Mori, where I lusted after a painting with 4 of the scenes from the stretching room ($400 - so I passed :D ) we were getting pretty hungry and decided it was time to head for our lunch ADR. I was wanting to try some new restaurants this time, so I'd made a lunch reservation for The Wave at the Contemporary Resort. A quick monorail ride over and we were checking in and seated quickly for lunch. Chris decided a cappuccino was in order



I decided to warm myself up with an alternative beverage.



We ordered their tuna appetizer.



This was tasty, but we both thought the tuna we'd had at Hollywood Brown Derby the night before was superior. I got a soup, salad and sandwich combo and Chris went with a burger and fries. Both were pretty tasty.



And, hey, as long as we were there, why not some dessert. :D A trio of chocolates. This was pretty good.



I really liked The Wave. Service was good, the food tasty and the atmosphere relaxing. It was quick and easy to get to from the MK, so I would definitely consider it again for a mid-day break from the park. It was approaching time for our last FP+, so we headed back out only to arrive to a park that was INSANELY packed!



We decided that we'd ride our last FP ride and then bail out to relax at the hotel before dinner. Next up was



The standby line was nearly 3 hours!!! What the what?? It's a cute little ride, but seriously? That's just crazy. We waited about 15 minutes or so in FP and then enjoyed our little ride. Hey, Dopey, hey! We are coming for you!!



We headed out to escape back to the Poly, but the resort line monorail wait was pretty long, so I thought it would be fun to take the boat across. We ended up waiting quite awhile, but it was so pretty out (and STILL cold), that it made for a nice little trip back to the resort.



The GCH at Poly really is so pretty, but it seems to always be just a buzz of activity.



We relaxed at the hotel for awhile and then made a quick change before heading to the monorail and a quick ride over to the Grand Floridian for dinner at



It was really pretty and the wine quite tasty. We had a pretty view of the pool too, where we saw some insane teenagers jump into the pool!! WHAT??? BRRRRRR. Although I could see my insane teenagers doing that as well.


[URL='https://flic.kr/p/DNk8fP']
I don't recall specifically what we got to eat. I think I got scallops and Chris some kind of steak. They were good, but I have to admit I was a bit disappointed. The atmosphere was beautiful and the service great, but the food (especially for the price) just wasn't anything special.

After dinner, we looked around the shops at the hotel and just enjoyed the atmosphere before heading back for a monorail ride around the loop and back to the Poly. We laid out our stuff for the 10K the next day again layering up and packing up blankets, mylar, and hand warmers before climbing in bed around 9 PM. I think we both managed to fall asleep pretty quickly after a long and busy day.

Next up: 10K time and, HEY, I see Dissers!




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MK looked insanely busy! Looks like you had a solid plan with great FP and meal selections! Cold busy day for you two! Looking forward to your 10K.
 
I think every park was busy on that Thursday. AK was crazy too. The Wave looks good. I had it booked for our arrival day but we cancelled to give us more time for the expo and such which actually worked out best. I hope to try it soon. I have never been to Citricos either but it does look nice. That sucks it wasn't exactly what you were hoping for though.

I saw some people come back from the BLT pool when walking to our room one of the days and I was like WHAT?!

Can't wait for the 10K report!
 
CUTE Pluto picture!!

Totally agree with your thoughts on the redhead scene. ::yes:: and on Citricos - one of Will’s favorites but i think there are better signatures at WDW.

Yay, 10K and DIS’ers next!! :yay:
 
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Excited to join in. Excited to see how your 10K day went. I have to agree with you on the redhead scene, it is time.
 
Yikes on that MK crowd. When I was there in December, there were 5 if the headliners down at once, and they actually ended up extending park hours because so many people were angry.

My friend and I left midday when we were overwhelmed by crowds, and we walked to the contemporary for lunch, air conditioning, and phone charging. I think it saved us from losing our minds.
 

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