Better Luck Next Time, RunDisney.

If any of you are members of the elite group that is Facebook, then you may have heard the news that RunDisney was going to be announcing a new race on their Facebook page.  To build up to the announcement, they had a month-long series of clues, which were basically unsolvable.  Well, they made the announcement on Tuesday, and they are the proud new owners of a new race in Disneyland...the Tinkerbell Half Marathon.

Not sure if this is the official logo, but here's a logo from the internet.

If you go to the RunDisney fan page, you will see that there are a large number of people that are pretty upset about this new race.  Mainly because they build it up for so long, only to announce a half marathon (as opposed to a marathon or triathlon).  Also, because this is a "women's" race.  That means that the race is designed specifically for women...the participant shirt is a women, the expo is geared toward women, and all the support on the course will be geared toward women.  Men are also not eligible for any awards.

I don't have a problem with this, in theory, I just think that RunDisney missed a great opportunity to include everyone.  There's a guy on Facebook (I don't remember his name) that had a great idea:  RunDisney could easily stick with the Tinkerbell theme, but could have added pirates for the men.  Then make the race a competition between the men and the women, with the women getting a slight head start.  Then, each year the course theme would be based on the winning gender (pirates if the fellas win and Tinkerbell/fairies for the ladies).  I thought this guy basically hit a home run with his suggestion, and hopefully someone on the Disney team took note.  It's a really great concept.

I will say that I wouldn't have a problem signing up for the race, if I was running it with my wife or some other female.  I wouldn't sign up to run it by myself though.  Not that I would ever win an award, but I don't really want to pay $120 or so for a "fun run" to run by myself...that's what the 5k is for.  I can pretty much do that at home for free.   I sign up for a race, it's because I'm wanting to beat my previous time.  Whether or not I would ever win an award doesn't really matter, but it does take away from the other competition that would normally be there, as they won't be registering either.

I am glad that there's another race in Disneyland, I'm just a little disappointed that it was designed to exclude men (like I said, I know men can race, it's just not as appealing).  Oh well, I'll probably still run it!