The theme of the race is obviously Santa, what hooked me was you get a Santa hat, beard, and there are cookies, candy, and christmas music along the race course. Oh, and you get a cool running shirt that looks kind of like a santa jacket! For some reason I've always wanted a santa hat, I've just never obtained one for myself.
As far as race times go, Laura did great! she got a new personal best with a time of 2:29:43. Which compared with the half marathon we ran in April was an improvement of nine minutes! The night before the run we were walking around downtown Indy and most of the streets and sidewalks were still pretty icy. Up until then I was going to run it on my own, but after thinking that there was no way the course was going to be cleared of ice I decided to run it with Laura. So I also improved my time by minutes from our last run but I was still just over 30 minutes slower than I had hoped to run it in. Laura was pretty jazzed that she had a buddy for the cold race so that made me feel good.
The race itself however is not one I'd highly recommend to my friends. For several reasons. The biggest was the race coordinators over promised and under delivered on nearly every front for the event.
-Starting with the beginning, our sign-up confirmation said, if you book your room in the JW Mariott you can take a short sleigh ride to the start line. COOL! (corny but a fun to start race day). No sleigh ride. Just a walk.
-Christmas music along the race course. This wasn't a major selling point but they said it would be there, at minimum I expected maybe 3 places where music would be playing. There were ample water stations but only one had music. Under delivered.
-Candy along the race course! The official map claimed two stops. Only one candy stop.
-COOKIES! At packet pick-up they had a pallet of Sysco cookies saying, thats a lot of cookies (which it was). Really? Shitty frozen restaurant food? I could go on but won't. A real cookie brand would have made this seem more legit to me. Granted that didn't stop me from eating seven cookies along the route. They had trays of cookies at the finish, they were so boring I didn't even want to take a whole tray.
-The finish line. They had one, that even had a time and there was even a couple of photographers at it, but no announcer talking to people or anything, I was pretty happy there was music there at least.
-The post-race party. It was six days before the event before they announced it would be outdoors at the finish. Our bib even had a party ticket attached to it. There was no tent, some music, no hot food, no drinks(outside of water), no group of people. In fact the only indicator of a party was a plastic box that read: post race party Indy sitting next to a small stage. Laura and I might have stopped by to check it out before we left the hotel but it was 20 degrees outside with a 15 mph wind. Felt like 8. No tent, no heat, no party. The party turnout was so poor that when we finished there were as many workers as runners in the area.
-Finally, the reason I wanted to do this race in particular was strongly related to getting a hat and beard to run the race with. Yes we did get these things but the quality was on par with the cheapest halloween costumes. The hat was one size fits some, with no stretch to accommodate various head sizes. I was able to get the hat on my head but only barely. In the future I would recommend something stretchy or a couple of sizes.
I normally don't like to use this space to bitch about petty things like this but I guess I just did.
What did I like? The shirts were pretty exciting. Also the course route was fantastic. It even snowed for a little while adding to the romanticism of a santa race. I will applaud the organizers for having a 99% ice free course especially considering there was about 4 inches of snow followed by sleet and freezing temps the day and night before.
No comments:
Post a Comment