There's a middle ground, though. They should look to the WDW expos. I have not encountered a line to get into the merchandise area at TOT or WDW Marathon weekend expos. It just felt really really contrived to both me (have been to Disney expos before) and my brother (has been to many, many other, bigger, way more people attending, expos before).
And since I went on the first day and second to last day, and saw *more* merchandise out on the second visit...they obviously fixed any supply problems they had.
The only thing I could think of was theft-prevention, but there are other ways of dealing with that.
I didn't have a problem with the checkout being elsewhere, although it was weird to leave on my second visit when I had nothing to buy. Had to ask how to get out.
I think the difference in the end comes down to space. If memory serves me correct (it's been a year) almost every WDW race has two booths set up for merchandise. The
Disneyland Hotel literally doesn't have that kind of room for selling merchandise. Unless they decide to move it somewhere and the only option in the area that's bigger would be the Anaheim Convention Center. Which I guess they could so but does seem a bit overboard.
Either way there still learning. This was an improvement actually over Tink I think with the separate checkout area. I think by next time they'll have a separate exit. I think having it enclosed was to prevent another fire marshall shutdown like last year.
Anyways been meaning to post a recap on my end. But I wanted to get something sorteed out before I posted a really grumpy recap.
Long story short, my bib malfunctioned not once, but twice. It didn't work leaving the gate for the 10k. It didn't work leaving the gate at the half. Lesson learned, if it doesn't work properly at one race on the challenge insist on a new bib. Lady working runner relations said the chip was
supposed to be working. But the fact it didn't catch at the start suggests that something was going funky.
Sent an email on Monday of last week with proof of self tracked time (thank god for my Garmin). And got a reply yesterday saying they would change my time sometime early next week. Checked my results on Saturday and got the really nice surprise of seeing that everything had all ready been corrected!
All ready submitted proof of time for WDW Marathon with this time. Looks like I am going to be starting in either L or M. I'll take it over whatever corral I was in before!
Anyway on to the actual race:
I ended up with an overall time of 2:47. Which was a PR of over 33 minutes for me!
But also wasn't quiet the time I was aiming for (I was aiming for the 2:30s). Not sure what happened. Might have been just the back to back races. I know I was handling the weather just fine, heck I was handling it better than the previous two years. And I was enjoying the most running room I ever recall running Disney. Moving up in pace, does that to a person, I guess.
Didn't stop for photos. Which now I'm annoyed by because I thought one of the castle photographers got me coming out of it. But I can't seem to find the darn photo. So frustration abound here. So far any attempts to find it in the unidentified photos section have come up short. So I'm wondering if someone else might have accidentally got tagged with it.
Have some digging to do either way because I can't believe that I wasn't photographed at more spots. I really want to get a copy of the photos since this is my first race post-op so digging I go I guess.
On the bright side. It looks like I've officially moved out of the back of the pack section of runners and into mid-pack as far as halfs and shorter go. Though that might change with a shorter race. Was really surprised to see that I was actually technically in the first half of the finishers to complete the race (if you take the finishers and divide it by two my placement number is before that, admittedly not by much but hey I made it). Now I want to run a 5k for time and see where I end up (its been ages since I've done one for time). Amazing how much has changed in the past year (last year there were only a couple hundred people behind me when I finished Dumbo (yeah I'll admit I finished that by scraping by) this year there were several thousand).