This was the worst race I’ve ever participated in. It had so much potential but the organizers are not interested in running a world class race. There are so many problems with this event but I’ll try to compress my summary. I’ll start with the positives.
The EXPO was good, lots a swag, goodies, and plenty of vendors in a big area.
The course was great
Great runner tracking that posted directly to your Facebook wall so all your friends were getting real time updates.
Now for the negative
The start was a total fiasco. The race organizers obviously didn’t want to pay for cops to direct traffic coming into dodger stadium so the back up was huge getting in. The jam up was compounded due to the fact that they only had 2 gates open to get into the lot, . There were literally thousands of runners who just had people drop them off 2-3 miles from the start line and they were running into the Dodger Stadium lot. Shuttles were also stuck in the traffic jam and the race start time was delayed about 20 minutes. My in laws live 5 miles from Dodger Stadium and it took us about 1.5 hours to make the drive in.
Weather was horrible that day, but I actually thought it was pretty fun to run in those conditions.
The finish was were the real nightmare began. Once finished there was nobody there to tell us where to go, mind you it was the storm of year in SoCal that day. Turns out the post race area was a 1 mile walk from the finish and there was no family reunion area. People could not find their families and runners were starting to get hypothermic from the conditions. The people who saved the day were the Santa Monica hotels who let cold wet runners loiter in their lobbies to keep warm. LA Marathon had no contingency planning for these conditions and didn’t seem to care at all for the safety of the participants. It took me a couple hours after finishing to find my wife and daughters who were miserable and soaked as well. We then immeditately left for the car which was parked in a public garage in Santa Monica, the garage was flooded with runners trying to make their escape ,it took over 2 hours to get out of the garage because again, no traffic direction. It seems like LA Marathon Organziers didn’t care at all about the participants once they got our money. They will never get mine again.