The weekend started out with us taking an early flight to Los Angeles on Friday morning. We got to LAX with no problem and called a Lyft to take us to Anaheim. It was around a 45 minute drive until we got to our hotel. The room wasn't ready so we dropped off our bags with the front desk and headed off to the expo. The expo was at the Disneyland Hotel so we had to walk through the Disneyland esplanade area to get there. It took a really long time to get through security but we were finally in after 20 minutes or so. We then decided to stop for lunch in Downtown Disney on the way to the hotel and when we got there, it was about an hour or so after the expo opened. There were no lines for bib pick up and it went really smoothly. There didn't seem to be a lot of vendors or a lot of energy at the expo so we headed out after a little bit of browsing and some photo fun.
After the expo, we had to wait in another long line to get through security to get into the parks. I think this one took more like 30 minutes. Finally, we were in and rode the monorail to Disneyland. W had a great time with rides and just wandering around the park. Initially, I had thought about trying to stay up for World of Color at 9pm but given the early morning flight and the fact that I had to wake up at 3am for the 10k the next morning, we called it an early evening and went back to the hotel around 7pm or so.
Saturday morning, my alarm went off at 3am and I got ready in my Ms. Marvel gear. It's all tech wear but I just used fabric paint to paint the design on the shirt. I left the hotel room around 3:30 and happened to run into another runner walking to the start as well. We had a nice conversation on the way over and thankfully security just took a couple minutes this time. The way was marked pretty clearly to get to the starting area and it didn't take too long. I think I was there 15 minutes after leaving my hotel room. There was a lot of pre-race excitement going on and I took the opportunity to take some photos and admire all the cool costumes I saw. Lots of costumes based on Thor Ragnarok since that had come out just the week before the race.
I went over to the corrals around 4:30am. That got me right at the front of my corral and I sat on the ground to relax a bit before the start. Before I knew it, it was go time!
I loved the 10k course. There was a lot of park time between the two parks and even the back stage sections were a lot of fun. There were fun holiday decorations up in the parks as well as a lot of superhero theming for the race.
The official character lines were pretty crowded by the time I got through so I didn't stop for any of them but there were cast members in various places around park icons offering to take photos as well and I stopped for several of them.
We had opted to buy max pass, which was a way to get fast passes for the rides over our phones. An added benefit of this is that it included photo pass photos for free. So here are some of the photo pass photos from the race that I liked.
I knew that my plan was to take it easy and have fun during this race. I took a lot of photos and just really enjoyed the atmosphere of the race. They had great Thor elements. A lot of the cast members were dressed like citizens of Azgard. There were places where they had people dressed like Valkyrie or a fighter from Azgard encouraging us along. And there was a lot of crowd support in Disneyland itself.
I'm happy to say I was successful with my goal of having fun! It was a great race, a fun course, and I enjoyed taking it all in. And I felt pretty good after the race, which was important for purposes of heading to Disneyland for more rides! The race started so early that I was finished in time for us to walk back through Downtown Disney (we did not have to go through security again) and get in line at Disneyland in time for their early opening. Mike had brought me clothes to change into and we went forward for some more rides and characters. I also ate some of the snacks from the post-race food box to tide me over until we got something more substantial.
So that's it for the first part of the challenge. I'll be back soon to talk about the half marathon and our last day at the park.
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