It has been discussed in previous year's threads. If you do a search for the official thread 2014 you should be able to find it.
Here is a brief rundown of what I remember without searching for the thread myself (someone please correct me if I'm wrong). I think the corrals went up to J. The last corral is basically people who don't have POT or are expecting to take more than 3:30. The second last corral was for people with a proof of time between 3:15-3:30. The third last corral was for people with a POT between 2:30-3:15. And the 4th last corral was for 2:15-2:30 I think. That was the one I was aiming for, but it's not going to happen - I'll have to be content with the 3rd last corral (based on last year's placements). The last 3 corrals contained nearly half of all the runners with about 3000 in each - they were massive!
The corrals are usually opened about an hour before the start time - so 4:30am for a 5:30am start. They release the first corral (which is basically people who actually have a chance of winning the race) at 5:30am, then every few minutes until everyone has gone. I didn't do it last year (just the 5k and 10k), but I imagine with that many people in the last corrals, it would probably take a while for everyone to pass through the starting line. It's highly likely that the last corral wouldn't actually start until after 6am. This is a bit of a catch 22, because if you are in the last corral, you really want to get there nice and early so that you can at least be at the front of the corral, but then you'd be standing around waiting for at least an hour and a half to actually start running!
There was not much in the way of entertainment until about 5:15am, when the race announcers got up on stage (last year with Stitch) to get the crowd going. Once they start releasing corrals, they basically go through the same spiel for each one, so it gets a bit repetitive! Most people stood up the whole time, but my legs were tired so I sat down until the race announcers appeared.
If you want to improve your corral placement (so that you're not standing around for so long, and to give yourself more of a buffer from the sweepers), you have until 2nd June to lodge your POT.
I'm a Higdon gal so I'm just in it for the theme!
