Rock 'n' Roll San Antonio Marathon - RunMarathon

The weather got quite warm during the second half of the run. Overall, this was a terribly run race. Anytime you have 33,000+ runners in a race that should not have had more than half that, you have everyone park in one place, race start is in a second place, and race finish is in a third place...and your shuttle transportation system is well and truly broken...you have a crappy situation.

A number of runners actually ran the 3 miles from a downtown shuttle pickup point to the race start when they realized no shuttle bus was going to be coming. Then, at the finish, the line to take the people who had parked in the designated lots (about 1.5 miles from the finish) was about a half mile long. Ugh.

This is the second Rock and Roll race I have run, and the worst by far--I will never run this one again, nor would I encourage anyone I know to run it. The San Jose half marathon 2007 was better organized, but still deficient. We are going to give this series one last try in Seattle this June 2009, so we'll see after that.

Race was entirely too large of a field (33,000+), too small of an expo area, too small of a start area, too small of a finish area, too few shuttles to take runners from parking to/from start/finish area, course was entirely too many sharp turns, water breaks were inappropriately stationed right before or after turns causing hazardous footing, some water stations actually had put ICE in the drinks (that made not only drinking dangerous, but all that ice dumped out on the road made footing treacherous), road surface outside of city was horribly rough, etc. etc.

This is a for-profit group that puts on these Rock and Roll series races, and they showed their greed on this one. Will NEVER do it again, and would advise everyone to steer clear, as there are MUCH better organized marathons out there (Houston, anyone?).