When you head to Disney World for the Thanksgiving holiday, that doesn’t mean you get to skirt your responsibility to run a turkey trot on Thanksgiving morning. When looking for a race, the Ritz-Carlton Gobbler 5K was about a 20 minute Lyft from our hotel so we registered for the race and bright and early Thanksgiving morning made our way to the Ritz-Carlton for the run.

The race started right at the perfect Thanksgiving morning time of 7:30 AM and took runners on the cart paths of the back 9 of the golf course located at the hotel. There was nice scenery along the entire run as you would expect when running on a golf course.

The first stretch of the race was a bit crowded as runners made their way out onto the course as running over a cart bridge and narrow cart paths doesn’t allow a lot of wiggle room to get out from the crowd. About a half-mile in the race started to separate a bit and allowed for a bit more space on the course.

The race was a nice run on Thanksgiving morning but the $75 race registration fee per person was almost criminal. A long sleeve shirt that had the Ritz-Carlton logo on it but no mention of the race was given out and though medals were awarded to all runners the price just didn’t justify itself. Sure, small mimosas for those who drank were available and the post-run chair massage for five minutes was a nice treat but even simple things like water being in closed coolers on the course didn’t exactly live up to the expectations of what you would expect from a 5K race costing $75 per person. Plus, the course was about 3.3 miles long; not anything that I can’t tackle, of course, but another nit you would expect not to be the case for such an expensive 5K race. If proceeds were noted to go to a charity, maybe I’d feel differently about the cost of the race versus the experience but aside from that, no reason this race shouldn’t have been your standard $30 5K cost.

Mrs. Running Griffin and I ran the race together and cruised to a finishing time of 31:46, good for 10:14/miles against the advertised 5K distance.

If we end up back in Orlando for Thanksgiving, not sure we’d make this race the one we’d head unless they really rethink the cost structure of the race.