Changes are happening at runDisney this season. Dates are being shifted, qualifying times are extending, virtual races are being added and removed; but nowhere are the changes more noticed than at the Big Show – The 2025 Walt Disney World Marathon.
Several weeks ago runDisney upended expectations for the upcoming, 30,000+ participant, event.
Those runners dreading the early “crack of doom” rise that it takes to get them from their resort, to the bus, to the corrals just got some bad news: the start time has been moved back from 5:00 AM to 4:30 AM. It is a minor time change, but may prove difficult for those running the Dopey Challenge who will have gotten up pre-dawn for three days straight prior to this race.
Also, The course has been altered to front-load and, to a small extent, extend the time spent in the park. Where runners used to take a counter-clockwise pattern through the Magic Kingdom — with a jut through Cinderella’s Castle for the run’s most iconic moment — and then exit out of Frontierland, the new course has them turning left into the previously unexplored Adventureland and doing the route in a reversed, clockwise pattern, adding near a quarter mile to the time inside the park. The time in EPCOT Center, which serves as both start and end points for the race, has not been extended, but the traditional closing run through the park’s World Showcase has been moved to the very start of the race and the closing miles are a much shorter jaunt through the north side of the World Showcase Lagoon, towards Dreamer’s Point and then out near Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind.
Reasons for these changes have been vague with runDisney issuing a statement about runners wanting to spend more time in the parks (which is, of course, true). This doesn’t hold a lot of water, however, given that the only increased park time is an extra quarter mile in Magic Kingdom.
Two other reasons come up as far more likely. First, runners in the parks are a disruption to ticket buying customers. Many park-goers get into the celebratory spirit of the thing and cheer the runners along, but having to wait for a time to cross the course to get to an attraction or restaurant could be an understandable frustration for a family on a tight schedule. This is not so much an issue with Magic Kingdom as runners are invariably out of the park before opening, but could be a problem with EPCOT where the slowest runners, who’ve started at the back of the pack, previously would’ve been moving around World Showcase at the key lunchtime hours between noon and 1:00 PM. (If you are interested in my timing math, drop me a note in the comments and I can break it down.) By shifting the World Showcase piece of the course — the place where most people in the park head for pricier lunches — to earlier, Disney frees up that area in the afternoon. And by adjusting the starting time they make the shorter jaunt through the park to close the race, end in the 11:45 AM to 12:10 PM range.
These factors are likely influences on the schedule and course adjustments, but one other must also be art of this formulation: heat.
The weather at the parks on both coasts has become less predictable and more extreme. Heat coming at odd times of the year and earlier in the day is becoming a factor. While there were certainly complicating circumstances, the fact that a runner died at the Disneyland Halloween Half-Marathon, during an extreme heat wave in early September, would be something that runDisney would take very seriously.
A half hour can mean a great deal when the thermometer is rising past 80 degrees after you’ve run 25 miles.
runDisney as an organization has been easing back into a sense of normalcy after the severe disruption of the pandemic. The re-figuring of their operations during a time of great shifts in the theme park industry as a whole is likely to keep things interesting on the running side of the equation.
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Kelly McCubbin is a columnist for Boardwalk Times
