Running the 2024 Walt Disney World Marathon

I ran in the 2024 Walt Disney World Marathon. This was my second Disney Marathon. I ran my first one in 2022 and ended up catching a nasty case of COVID from the race. Thankfully no sickness from this run.

Started out at the Expo at Wide World of Sports to pick up my race packet.

During the last marathon I ran, I walked right in, picked up my stuff, and was out in under 30 minutes. This time I waited longer than that in queue lines to enter the building.

Picked up my race bib, then had to wait in more queue lines to pick up my race shirt and enter the Expo floor. I'm normally fine in crowds. I work in busy theme parks, but the crowd levels in here were a little extreme and I couldn't wait to get out of here. 

There was a whole other room of the Expo, basically selling Disney race merchandise, but it required a virtual queue reservation to enter. The issue was that none of the cast members manning the entrance of the building knew how to sign up for the virtual queue. Was the queue on the Disney app? Maybe? Maybe not? Was I going to waste my time downloading the app, just to find out I had to sign up another way all to enter a store where I was probably not going to buy anything? Nah. Too much work. 

Marathon morning came, far too early at Epcot. Spaceship Earth is pretty at 4am.

I ran in starting group C. I qualified for group B, but due to an injury and basically taking two months off from training, I joined someone else in the slower group.

Ran around parking lots, a bit of Epcot, then to Magic Kingdom. From there, there was a long back road through the rain to Animal Kingdom, followed by the parking lot of Blizzard Beach, a tiny bit of Hollywood Studios, the Boardwalk, and then back to Epcot where we rain around the World Showcase and then back to the finish line in the Epcot Parking Lot.