RunDisney really should give pre-race medals for completing the expo nowadays. If you haven't been to one lately, they are still fun don't get me wrong, but if you want race merchandise the experience becomes intense to put it mildly. My sister and I are in fact merch fans, so getting to Expo Day as early as possible, while still keeping our day jobs, is high priority.
I personally was wanting to get ahold of a Goofy Challenge "I did it!" magnet this Marathon Weekend to balance my Dopey one from last year. I definitely wasn't a put a magnet on the back of your car kind of a gal, but I guess everyone has their breaking point, and mine turned out to be 48.6 miles. That's the number of miles it took me to breakdown and say "yep, I need to drive around with the number of miles I can run on the rear of my car". And I have done so proudly since then, but my Dopey magnet looks a bit lonely and unbalanced back there; hence; my unofficial Marathon Weekend mission to find it a respectable 39.3 mile friend.
Now for those not familiar, Marathon Weekend works a bit different than the other runDisney race weekends and the Expo opens a day earlier to allow races to commence on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. We weren't scheduled to fly in until Thursday night, meaning we would arrive two days after the expo opened, or maybe more accurately two days behind ideal schedule. We knew the small sizes for clothing items would go in the first day along with the loungefly bags, but this princess hoped she had a fairygodmother looking out to help get that 39.3 mile magnet!
Since we currently call Texas home, travel is required for our runDisney race hobby. We typically opt for non-stop flights, and this was no exception. We flew out after work and arrived late that evenning in Orlando. We grabbed our rental car and pretty much went straight to where we were staying. This trip, we stayed off property for the first time. We definitely navigated some new learning curves, but also found it had a lot of perks too! We will post a comparison of our experience with the two options in a companion post (stay tuned!).
It had been a long day, so once unloaded and settled, I placed an Amazon fresh order to deliver the next morning. Highly recommend, even though it's not a cost savings. The convience factor just can't be beat. Thanks Amazon! Shortly after, we headed to bed to rest up for Expo Day!
As previously mentioned in this series' training thread, I started a new job pretty much simultaneously with training, so in pure poetic fashion, my busy season also ran right into Expo and Race weekend. I'm an Implementation Project Manager and had 5 clients going live on 1/1 with a standard two week surveillance period that conveniently overlapped not only WDW Marathon Weekend, but was also going to crash into the return races at Disneyland the following weekend. This was all accounted for in our planning, thanks again to my superhero in running shoes sister, but definitely learned some new things with the added challenge of working while expoing.
Since the expo didn't open until noon, I had a nice full work schedule that morning and worked hard to get everything wrapped up but ended up still listening in on a conference call while driving to the expo. While I was working my sister was getting us in virtual queue for merchandise, exploring the parks, getting me a swanky new phone cover (have I mentioned she's the best?), and grabbing lunch for us.
After arriving at the Expo, we went straight to merchandise as our number had come up in the queue. We were actually pleasantly surprised with what was left and then also got a bit lucky with some returns that were getting put back out on the floor. We usually spend quite a bit of time wandering around, doing the awkward try shirts/jackets on over your clothes thing to figure out how much too small or too large the sizing is for that particular weekend then take a TON of pics with numbers, and signs and all other random pretty things that the runDisney master marketeers place to help keep things magical.
We were unfortunately tight on time though this go round, because I did have to get back to work. We cut merch shopping short, grabbed our bibs, got some extra safety pins since one of us accidentally misplaced one before we left the vendor Expo area, and then had to do a quick return to the runDisney merch area to get annual pass holder credit on the merch we had bought. Pro tip, the information booth had extra to spare for us so we didn't have to return to the bib area. Happy win!
While my sister got the price adjustment on our merch, I hoped on another conference call, and at that point we realized we probably needed to quit while we were ahead and find a quieter space for me to finish out my workday. We have decided Expo Day when you are workfree and carefree is preferred, shocking right? Gotta keep that day job though if we want to come back! To answer your final question, yes! I did get my magnet and all is now right on the back of my vehicle.
This was just the start of small magical things that made this weekend one to remember. We hope you check in on our next tale of the half marathon that was and wasn't...or maybe the half of the half marathon...or perhaps even the 7.1 half marathon. Disney math at is finest and we can't wait to tell you how we "weathered" that storm!
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