Should I avoid marathon weekend?

[Meghoya]

After lots of negotiation, we decided on a week in jan for our next Disney trip, come to find out it's marathon weekend!! How annoying is that for non-runners? Crowd levels? Closures? We picked January for low crowd levels and less annoyance. Should we change our dates??

Thanks!

Meg

 

[MSSANDRA]

We were there the week leading up to the race a couple of years ago. We found that week (the first week of January) much more crowded than we had anticipated. I think that really depends on how the New Years falls on the calendar as to when most kids go back to school. We left the day of the race. We saw a lot of runners at our resort a day or two before that but never an issue. We had info in our room on closed roads and way to avoid the runners. We were leaving that day and just choose to sleep in, enjoy the resort, check out at 11:00 and by then, it was all over. The week following the race will be much less crowded. The race is most likely this week-end this year. What I do is to keep an eye on the wait time on my DE for a time period we are considering and just see how the wait times are. We like the two weeks around MLK day because the kids have a few days off and we have always had great low crowds.

 

[jimandami]

If we aren't running the marathon, we like to arrive the Sunday of marathon weekend. Crowds that next week have always been really low for us, and you avoid the MLK holiday.

 

[Meghoya]

Thanks for the feedback. I think we'll try to tweak our dates now!

Meg

 

[jll2800]

We just left disney yesterday, so on the second to last day of the events leading up to the full marathon (which was today). We were there for 5 nights. Monday and Tuesday were not bad. This was our first trip in a decade so I'm no expert in crowds at disney, but it didn't seem too bad those first two days. We definitely noticed a pick up in crowds starting wednesday night and thursday, which I think is when some of the events started. Then Friday we definitely noticed things getting more crowded, though it certainly wasn't unbearable. Our hotel got fuller (WL), too. We left Saturday morning, and it was kind of a hassle because lots of roads were blocked off for the runners, and it disrupted some of the parks. You'd need to leave extra time to get around Saturday (and presumably Sunday too).

All in all, I didn't think it was too bad and I don't regret going last week, but it certainly wasn't dead in the parks.