Marathon Weekend 2023

[striker1064]

I get that it was a perfect storm of demand yesterday, but I think the queue was completely ineffective.

Yesterday, at ~9:45 I got into the queue on both my personal and my work cell phone. Remained in queue on both those devices until registration finally opened up at 12:30. Both had wait times of over an hour. Just for giggles, after watching for 3 minutes and both still showing at over an hour, I opened up a new page on my work laptop and clicked the "register" button for the 5k and it brought me right to the registration page.

The first of my queued devices finally let me in at 1:37, by which time Dopey would've been sold out. People hitting the register button should not be put into a randomized place in the queue, they should only be allowed in after everyone in queue has had a chance to register.

This is also why I was reading yesterday's discussion about runDisney possibly creating a lottery system with some amusement - based on my previous experiences with entering the queue with multiple browsers, rD is already using a lottery system! You never know what you're gonna get when you enter the queue, and entering early, on time, or late has absolutely no bearing on your wait time.

 

[Dom497]

I think everyone is forgetting that Disney is a business and as the past few years have shown, they will only spend money if they absolutely need to. Why would they invest in improving the registration process if they know everything will sell out anyways?

The only way they'll change the process is if people vote with their wallets and stop registering (which we all know won't happen).

 

[deadvc]

I think everyone is forgetting that Disney is a business and as the past few years have shown, they will only spend money if they absolutely need to. Why would they invest in improving the registration process if they know everything will sell out anyways?

The only way they'll change the process is if people vote with their wallets and stop registering (which we all know won't happen).

I don't disagree that this seems to be the attitude Disney has taken in recent years. But I hope they eventually realize the damage they're doing to their brand, which has a value. I know we're not fully seeing the impacts yet in terms of attendance, but we will eventually. Post-closure pent up demand will eventually dissipate, and they won't have the anniversary to prop them up either.

You're already seeing evidence of the brand damage in the way people talk about the company. Once upon a time it was always "Disney will make it right". Now you constantly see things like what you're saying: "well, it's a company and it's about the money".

 

[Kitty-chan]

This is also why I was reading yesterday's discussion about runDisney possibly creating a lottery system with some amusement - based on my previous experiences with entering the queue with multiple browsers, rD is already using a lottery system! You never know what you're gonna get when you enter the queue, and entering early, on time, or late has absolutely no bearing on your wait time.

True . . . but other race registration lotteries are better organized! There will be a window for lottery entries (say, a couple weeks), and then the race organizers runs the software that selects the winners. You'd need a pretty sophisticated algorithm in the case of Marathon Weekend, since there are SO many possible combinations of registrations and registrants. But you could do it, with sufficient funding.

 

[Kitty-chan]

because it bothers me, as a software engineer, to have a system that is poorly designed! But as I keep pointing out, they are not consulting me on their decisions!

It bothers me too, as an IT Project/Program Manager who spends a LOT of time helping people weigh costs/benefits on system deployments!

 

[fatmanatee]

I get that it was a perfect storm of demand yesterday, but I think the queue was completely ineffective.

Yesterday, at ~9:45 I got into the queue on both my personal and my work cell phone. Remained in queue on both those devices until registration finally opened up at 12:30. Both had wait times of over an hour. Just for giggles, after watching for 3 minutes and both still showing at over an hour, I opened up a new page on my work laptop and clicked the "register" button for the 5k and it brought me right to the registration page.

The first of my queued devices finally let me in at 1:37, by which time Dopey would've been sold out. People hitting the register button should not be put into a randomized place in the queue, they should only be allowed in after everyone in queue has had a chance to register.

Woof. This stinks and if they keep this up I'm going to have to prep not only multiple browsers to get into the queue to start, but an additional log-in for right after the queue opens. It's a broken system.

 

[mrs. magoo]

Was going to say even before @jmasgat responded, are you specifically referring to the near hospitality house studios? They've been gone since the 11 month mark. Speaking as an OKW owner, that's true of every race weekend.

Better to book and cancel if you don't get into the race, than get into the race and risk being shut out of your desired room size/category.

This is his first time actually doing a race. He was registered in 2021 when the race did not occur. He did get to use my points at the Poly for the a nice weekend. My husband and I did the Wine and Dine 10 years ago and we were able to preregister because of DVC so I was not aware of how things had changed. My running days are over - arthritis in my knee - I can walk forever but running kills me. Unfortunately I can not keep the 13 minute pace for walking for more than 3 miles because I would totally love to walk the half. Good luck to all.

 

[madame_jedi]

I decided to make a (what I knew would be useless) call to Run Disney to explain my situation (got up and waited in the queue from 11:45pm-2:30am Aus time - 9:45am-12:30pm eastern time) and that I had to give up and go to sleep so missed out. Also let them know that we were basing our entire trip to the US around the Marathon Weekend dates.
The lady I spoke to on the phone couldn’t have cared less and said they ‘didn’t know of any technical issues with the release’. When I asked if there was any way to get an entry she replied with “no”.
She couldn’t have sounded any less enthusiastic when she finished the call with “have a magical day”.

While I didn’t expect an outcome from the call, I also didn’t expect the rudeness and lack of sympathy either. Also, I find it very hard to believe she wasn’t aware of the technical dramas!

I 100 percent would have asked to speak to her manager. There may be nothing they can do but there is no excuse for rudeness. You’re planning a huge trip and are going to give Disney a bunch of your hard earned money. The least they can offer is polite sympathy.

 

[Z-Knight]

i despise race lotteries with a passion...that has to be the worst system ever invented. I'd rather try and fail via a queue that may be random in the end then some lottery system that inevitably will never pick me for multiple years in a row. The main solution right now is to open up the number of registrations because I feel that they are limiting them too much. I'm not even talking about limits due to Covid, simply the self imposed caps they had in the past - I think they can support more people in these races. I think the max I have ever seen it was somewhere like 20,000 runners for a half marathon - they can easily make that closer to 30,000 and still hold the races.

 

[ZellyB]

Careful with that buffer time. I think you need a 2:07 or so half marathon to equate to a 4:30 marathon.

While I agree that's likely what will be necessary for the marathon, I suspect it won't hurt you to enter a half-marathon PoT of longer than that as long as it's under 2:15 and verifiable, especially since Disney really doesn't give you a PoT race equivalency calculator that they use, right? They won't place you in a PoT corral possibly (probably), but I don't think you'd suffer a last corral punishment either. At least that's what my husband and daughter may end up doing since they can likely get a half-marathon PoT of under 2:15 prior to the cutoff but maybe not under 2:07. At least that's what we are hoping.

Reading these posts is doing a good job in confirming that we, the runners, essentially hit RunDisney with a denial of service attack yesterday. I'm not one to be overly sympathetic towards Disney IT, but it seems like they were faced with a perfect storm of unanticipated demand in combination with each registrant multiplying that effect through the use of multiple browsers, on average (I've seen reports ranging from use of a single browser all the way up to 12(!)).

I'm not sure how they were supposed to anticipate that kind of incoming volume, given that registration has typically not filled up for selected races for months, in some cases. See @DopeyBadger's excellent sell-out timing thread for recent history on that front. Even factoring in a theoretical increase in interest from the anniversaries, I don't think this was foreseeable. The combo of 25th marathon anniversary and 5th Dopey anniversary wasn't nearly this chaotic.

I think the current queue-based registration system is a big improvement over the days of "refresh and pray" Active registration. Unfortunately, it's turned into a browser tab arms race that's painful for everyone involved and I don't know what the solution is.

Well, one solution is to do what other intensely popular races (like Chicago) did and that's to go to a lottery. Frankly, I doubt anybody wants that especially since so many people tend to run Disney races with friends or family. My husband and I were lucky when we entered the lottery for Chicago that we both got in, but we truly weren't sure what we would do if only one got in. LIkely would have gone the way of a charity, but it was still a sizable financial risk. So, seems you are stuck with the current system. I find the random queue to likely be more fair than first in/first out honestly when the races sell out this quickly. The fact that one person may have better equipment/internet speed connection/whatever also seems inherently unfair and random queue assignments at least mitigates that I would imagine.

While the IT debacle seems avoidable (I know bupkis about IT though), the anger at Disney over the sell-outs seems misplaced. It reminds me of people who are mad that the parks are crowded and lines are long. They've created a product that has a massive appeal and demand outpaces supply. I don't know how they are supposed to fix that honestly. Or perhaps I should say, they have no incentive to fix that. I'll eat all those words though if the supply is being artificially reduced in order to drive Club rD memberships, although I don't know how we'd ever know that for sure.

Regardless of any of that, I am really sorry for those who did everything right, desperately wanted to get into a race, and were shut out. It sucks and there's no way around that. I can only hope that more registrations open up later in the year and you have another opportunity to register.

 

[DopeyBadger]

I think the max I have ever seen it was somewhere like 20,000 runners for a half marathon - they can easily make that closer to 30,000 and still hold the races.

Here's an old table rteetz posted back in the day.



From my data, 2018 HM had 27663 assigned bibs, 2019 HM had 25145 assigned bibs, 2020 HM had 26513 assigned bibs, and 2022 HM had 16400 assigned bibs.

 

[ZellyB]

i despise race lotteries with a passion...that has to be the worst system ever invented. I'd rather try and fail via a queue that may be random in the end then some lottery system that inevitably will never pick me for multiple years in a row. The main solution right now is to open up the number of registrations because I feel that they are limiting them too much. I'm not even talking about limits due to Covid, simply the self imposed caps they had in the past - I think they can support more people in these races. I think the max I have ever seen it was somewhere like 20,000 runners for a half marathon - they can easily make that closer to 30,000 and still hold the races.

I understand what you are saying, but I shudder to think but course crowding would look like. They really can't extend the corral start times by that much and still get the races cleared in time to minimize disruption to the parks (which is after all, the primary business model for Disney in Orlando), so I'm honestly not sure how they could possibly squeeze in 10,000 more people to the race course. I ran Chicago back in 2019 and they had something like 45,000 racers. While I don't specifically remember how the start corrals worked, my recollection is that they were spread out a lot more than Disney and that the course itself was dramatically wider through pretty much every mile. I just keep thinking about 10,000 more racers trying to get through cone alley and it just seems dangerous.

 

[Barca33Runner]

i despise race lotteries with a passion...that has to be the worst system ever invented. I'd rather try and fail via a queue that may be random in the end then some lottery system that inevitably will never pick me for multiple years in a row. The main solution right now is to open up the number of registrations because I feel that they are limiting them too much. I'm not even talking about limits due to Covid, simply the self imposed caps they had in the past - I think they can support more people in these races. I think the max I have ever seen it was somewhere like 20,000 runners for a half marathon - they can easily make that closer to 30,000 and still hold the races.

I’ll politely disagree with this. If their only priority was the races, yes, they could certainly devise systems to accommodate more runners.

However, on any given race day, their primary (and secondary, and tertiary, etc., etc.) priority is having the parks open for paying guests to buy tickets, food, souvenirs, Genie+, Individual Lightning Lanes, and on and on, with as limited interruption and inconvenience as possible. They want the parks, parking lots, roads, and backlot cleared and reopened as quickly as possible. As rD fans and participants we would like to think that our experience and presence is their top priority but it isn’t.

In lieu of this I think it would be very difficult for them to achieve their goals while adding runners. In recent years we’ve seen them dial back starting times and limit park park access in their courses; I can only imagine these things would be taken to even further absurd lengths if there were thousands more runners for each race.

 

[CP3uhoh]

i despise race lotteries with a passion...that has to be the worst system ever invented. I'd rather try and fail via a queue that may be random in the end then some lottery system that inevitably will never pick me for multiple years in a row. The main solution right now is to open up the number of registrations because I feel that they are limiting them too much. I'm not even talking about limits due to Covid, simply the self imposed caps they had in the past - I think they can support more people in these races. I think the max I have ever seen it was somewhere like 20,000 runners for a half marathon - they can easily make that closer to 30,000 and still hold the races.

sounds like you're like me who can take or leave stopping for characters. I often do depending how rare they are and there's usually not a long line where I am but for most people, they do these specifically for the parks and characters and the lines would be untenable with 50% more people. there are also areas that already have huge bottlenecks (like next to the water from Hollywood to BW) that some don't deal with but many do making it hard even to go above a brisk walk there. So could they handle 30,000 people focused on their race time and not entertainment, of course, but that's not a realistic expectation here. No judgement by me here for people who stop for every photo either, that's what your'e paying for, for Dopey I certainly stopped many times because it's the easiest way for me not to over do it and that's true for a lot of people for any of the challenges.

 

[CP3uhoh]

Here's an old table rteetz posted back in the day.

View attachment 663778

From my data, 2018 HM had 27663 assigned bibs, 2019 HM had 25145 assigned bibs, 2020 HM had 26513 assigned bibs, and 2022 HM had 16400 assigned bibs.

yikes, felt like plenty of people last year and that seems way off the norm....Interesting they asked Dopey registrants anticipated 5k and 10k pace yesterday, that wasn't a thing last year IIRC. They definitely put RunD members in corral 1 as I was in 2 for all races and saw some people that clearly did not have a POT. Then again, 1 was so small for the half and full, it didn't mean much to be in 2 especially with the waves, certainly plenty of room.

 

[camaker]

yikes, felt like plenty of people last year and that seems way off the norm....Interesting they asked Dopey registrants anticipated 5k and 10k pace yesterday, that wasn't a thing last year IIRC. They definitely put RunD members in corral 1 as I was in 2 for all races and saw some people that clearly did not have a POT. Then again, 1 was so small for the half and full, it didn't mean much to be in 2 especially with the waves, certainly plenty of room.

They've asked Dopey participants for anticipated 5k & 10k paces since I've been running it (2017-present). It was definitely asked for during registration last year.

 

[SarahDisney]

The thing with lotteries is that a lot of people want to register for the lottery right away so it can still crash a website.
NYRR (the organization that runs the NYC marathon) takes their website offline for a few hours before opening a lottery and then has a queue system for the lottery on the first day. So there can still be chaos, even with a lottery.

I don't work for Disney, and while I do have some tech knowledge, I'm not IT or DevOps (my job isn't getting the page to load, it's building what you see and interact with after the page loads), so I don't know what happened or what could have gone differently. It's all well and good to speculate but in the end we really don't know what happens behind the scenes.
But remember that runDisney is such a small percentage of Disney's revenue and the major enthusiasts like us are a small percentage of runDisney runners so I don't know that they have that much incentive to make this system better (Genie+, on the other hand ...).

 

[ValW]

yikes, felt like plenty of people last year and that seems way off the norm....Interesting they asked Dopey registrants anticipated 5k and 10k pace yesterday, that wasn't a thing last year IIRC. They definitely put RunD members in corral 1 as I was in 2 for all races and saw some people that clearly did not have a POT. Then again, 1 was so small for the half and full, it didn't mean much to be in 2 especially with the waves, certainly plenty of room.

Club members without POT were placed in S2.

 

[luv2cheer92]

yikes, felt like plenty of people last year and that seems way off the norm....Interesting they asked Dopey registrants anticipated 5k and 10k pace yesterday, that wasn't a thing last year IIRC. They definitely put RunD members in corral 1 as I was in 2 for all races and saw some people that clearly did not have a POT. Then again, 1 was so small for the half and full, it didn't mean much to be in 2 especially with the waves, certainly plenty of room.

They always ask for estimated pace for 5K and 10K

 

[CP3uhoh]

Club members without POT were placed in S2.

I saw children in S1 for the 5k.