OMG! Chris I wish I had read the board before we left for the race! I'm bumming now that we didn't get to say howdy to you
If you saw a red Vue with a Mickey dressed up as a Turkey in the window you saw our car LOL (no we didn't paint the car into a Penguin Turkey, Susan's DH would have killed us since there is still remenants of the Pig on it LOL)
I died on those 4 miles I was so cold! The wind was brutal. LOL Cathy and I did the race in 1 hour and 1 minute with I can't remember how many seconds. Not that you see that in the race results LOL But I wore my Garmin so I know better
Susan the social butterfly of the race spent Mile 1 thru the finish talking to an interesting lady who had done quite a few races (including Jamica! sounded cool). So susan finished a few minutes behind us. I try to PR and Susan tries to start Conga lines in races
We were very impressed with the organizations of everything from the shuttles to the start, the bib/shirt pick up to water on the course. Everything ran smoothly for the 2nd year of their race. Beautiful park course and we even got to see deer running across the field we were circling. (i love seeing the deer in our own park so it was almost like being at home).
The only thing that surprised me was the handling of the medals. Probably because my medal experience is with Disney and the Flying Pig where they hand you at the finish the medal. when we started the medals were on tables being guarded by volunteers which I guess was neat because we saw the honkin' medal and knew we had to finish to get one
but i figured they would be handing them out like at Disney and when I finished you got in line and picked up your own medal. I'm not sure if anyone was watching if people took only 1. Seemed a bit of a free for all. At least the line was moving and orderly.
They had 2 medals since they were worried they wouldn't have enough. The race was suppose to be 2000 people but they had such a good response they raised it to 2400. So they ordered plain white t-shirts just in case and from what I understand is if you were one of the late entries and received the white t-shirt they were going to mail you the burgendy tech shirt. The main 'honkin' big penguin medal' is amazing. it's quite hefty and it's got the penguin in turkey feathers. i love it. i took that one. susan and Cathy opted for the back up medal which is a spinner and more colorful.
The people involved: the bus drivers, packet pick up and even the park rangers and everyone else in between were amazingly cheerful and supportive. i would recommend this race because except the weird handling of the medals which might be normal in non-disney races (again my experience is limited) this race was amazingly effieciently run.
There was a bit of a wait afterwards to be shuttled back to the cars (you have to get there really early to park at the start) but the high school were you park is only a 1/2 mile away and we walked it and I think we went out of our way because we saw others walking that had come a more direct route, there must have been a trail/sidewalk we didn't see.
If I were to rate it on a scale from 1 to 5 .....
Sadly the 7 hour round trip drive will most likely keep us from the Thanksgiving run but we are definitely looking at getting to their Cinco De Myo 5K some year.
I'll be hunting down other Thanksgiving weekend races today/tomorrow to see what we can arrange for 2008
I think I'm hooked on doing a Thanksgiving race each year now just need one closer to home.
Glad you had a good time.
