Another weekend, another Disney race – different coast, though!

We are back at Disneyland for the second annual Tinker Bell Half Marathon weekend. The Neverland Family 5K was this morning (Saturday), and the half marathon is tomorrow. We’re only doing the half marathon, though the 5K looks like it was a lot of fun!

The Tinker Bell Half Marathon is the second Disney race that is women-focused. (The Princess Half, celebrating its 5th annual race next month, was the first.) The Tinker Bell half is VERY popular – this year’s race sold out in 29 days last summer! There are over 14,000 people entered in the half marathon – 12,459 female runners and 1,634 male runners. (Or “the smartest guys on the planet”, as race announcer Rudy Novotny described them.)

Last year there were three weeks between Marathon weekend at Walt Disney World and Tinker Bell weekend at Disneyland – this year (and next year) they are only a week apart. I think Disney is trying to discourage the coast-to-coasters. But it’s not working – there are seven members of Team AllEars here, and I have seen a number of Goofy and marathon shirts from last weekend. I’m hoping they will tell us how many coast-to-coast entries they have.

This is at least a relatively easy race for us since we get to stay in our same timezone, and it’s a short drive from San Diego.

The race starts at 5:00 a.m., but most of the hotels around here are within walking distance of the start line, so there’s no need to catch a bus insanely early. It sure makes things a lot easier than they are at Disney World.

The weather is way different from last weekend in Florida – though it’s been in the high 70s during the day, it’s in the 40s at sunrise, and will only barely hit 60 by 9:00 when most of us will be done. Humidity only around 40%, too. Perfect running weather, though it’ll be chilly waiting around for the start.

Lee and I will once again be running in our sparkly running skirts and pixie wings like we did last year. (He’ll be wearing a tutu for the Princess Half, though!)

So, today after we arrived we went to the Health and Fitness Expo at the Disneyland Hotel Convention Center. Packet pick-up, where we turn in our waivers and get our bib numbers, was down in the parking garage where it usually is.

There were very few people picking up registration packets – we had no wait at all. We also got our coast-to-coast wristbands, so that we can get that medal after the race tomorrow.

I registered us as a two-person team – Team AllEars! Team numbers started at 20,000.

The volunteers at the chrono-tag check were cheering all of us as we came through.

Then we went upstairs to the Expo itself, which is in the Disneyland Hotel’s Convention Center. After last weekend at Disney World, this was a LOT less crowded and much more pleasant to wander through.

We picked up our goodie bags. In addition to the race shirt (which comes in men’s AND women’s styles – are you listening, Disney World Marathon people????) they gave us a mesh drawstring “backpack”. The shirt is nice – it’s the lighter-weight tech shirt that I prefer over the ones that WDW uses. The design is the one that we voted on – runDisney gave us a choice of three, as I recall.

Our favorite medal hanger company, sporthooks.com, has some new designs – we really love this one – and yes, we bought it. 🙂

We had a nice chat with Disney race announcer Rudy Novotny. Today was his birthday, and he was working – he had already called the 5K in the morning, and was announcing at the Expo too.

We also visited the Official Merchandise area. It looked like they had plenty of merchandise, with a lot of different shirt designs (more than are pictured here!). No merchandise for men, though, except the gray Coast-to-Coast shirt we saw last week, and very few of those, in just a couple of sizes.

I liked the sentiment on this one.

Like they did in Florida last week, they were allowing people to pre-register for the Disneyland Half Marathon weekend events in September. They had quite a few computers set up, and the line wasn’t too long. Race registration officially opens on January 22 – I wonder if there will be any openings left for the Dumbo Double Dare by then.

When we wandered through Downtown Disney we saw signs announcing the early opening of a number of venues tomorrow – places where the early runners can get coffee and/or something to eat. A lot of cold and sleepy people are going to be buying something hot tomorrow morning!

We brought bagels and yogurt from home – and that’s what we’ll be eating in the morning. Now it’s time to try to get some sleep before the wake-up call comes in waaaay too early.

It should be a terrific race!