The Minion run earlier this year had way more photo ops, the Minions were all over the place with Gru and the kids throughout the course and that really made this one a bit disappointing in that regard. If you werent paying attention, you’d miss the raptor photo op since its all the way on the right corner after running through the rides course while the race route is a sharp left turn. Other photo ops were fan made vehicles which most could also miss as they are just on the side of the course but the short stretch by the movie cars that leads to the spitting dinos (they removed the water) and into the indominus was a nice touch.
And yeah, the corrals needs improvement, even in their faq it says you vant change corrals but if you arent assigned one then it makes no sense.
I got back from the 10k a few hours ago and they just really stretched out the course to get an extra 3miles out of their property which made us run outside the park to the side street close to the freeway (yes, that steep hill when you get out of the parking lot and before entering the 101) and then a short stretch inside the parking structure and it felt like it was at least 15-20 warmer inside the parking lot.
And by the way, the 10k moved up to the castle before you have to run back so thats another photo op.
Overall I found it fun though those steep hills are a killer and all you could really do is make it up on the downhill runs without stumbling down lol. Theres a lot of room for improvement and I imagine the upcoming Trolls are gonna have way more characters photo ops. Hopefully they do a Universal Monsters Run, they’d have plenty of character photo ops with that theme and Harry Potter is going to be their biggest ip.
I am not sure how they can fix the bottlenecks on the course but they definitely need to utilize the pace requirement and fixing the corrals. Maybe use the film sets like the NY building and Back to the Future clocktower location, that could be a cool place to run through.
With the big drop of runners from 5k to 10k though (5k has supposedly 5,000 runners and todays 10k only had 1,000) I wonder if they’ll continue to offer it?
And they also need to fix the actual length of the race, yesterdays 5k was more like 5.6k and todays 10k was 11k.