New York City Half Marathon Experience + #WeRunSocial Meet Up!

Happy Tuesday!

On Sunday I ran the NYC Half Marathon. If you follow me on Instagram, you already know I didn’t have a fabulous race, but I’ll get into that more tomorrow for the official race recap!

Instead of a typical Expo, the NYC Half puts on an “experience“. At first I was kind of sad that it wasn’t an official expo, but after I go there, I really loved it!

I caught a morning train from my house in Stamford on Saturday to head down to NYC to go to the Experience. There I would be able to pick up my bib, t-shirt and also gain some knowledge about the course.

When I arrived to the expo it was already very busy (which usually happens when you wait until the day before a race to get your bib)! There were volunteers right by the front doors available to tell you exactly where to go depending on what you needed.
*I have to apologize in advance for my photos. It was kind of crowded so it was hard to get quality photos*

I really enjoyed this wall. It was pretty big and it was great to see how many people wrote down all the various reasons about why they run. It was pretty cool!

As I nmentioned before, this was not a typical expo so there weren’t tons of vendors selling items, but they did have a “shopping area”. It was small, but had some nice items unique to the NYC Half (finisher shirts, etc).

If you needed to grab a quick bite, you were in luck since there was an Eataly right past the shopping area!

Of course they always have great backdrops available to take your offical “pocked up my bib photo” 🙂

I love that NYRR is very involved in the community and they also give runners the opportunity to run races for charity. It was nice to see this on full display during the Experience.

Charity Village was great because each charity has a table set up where you could find out more information about the organization. I would love to run a race for the ASPCA one day so I stopped by their table to get more information.

I think the best/most useful part of the experience for me was the opportunity to listen to course strategy. As this was my first time running the race, it was nice to hear from a few experts and get their tips and tricks for the course.

I also thought this blown up map of the course was pretty cool!

Overall I think the Experience was great. As a newbie to the race, I appreciated all of the information that was provided. The area wasn’t that large so it did get very crowded at times but I think that’s to be expected for such a large race!

Later on that day, Dani and I hosted the first official #WeRunSocal Meet Up in NYC! I think I was more looking forward to the meet up vs. the NYC Half (opps)! We held the meet up at the Experience. It was a little hard to find a free area to stand and chat but once we did, everything was awesome. Just look at all of these smiliing faces!

It was fun to talk to everyone about their time in NYC, their upcoming races, etc. It was so great to see everyone that showed up for the meet up! I get so excited when I meet social media friends in person for the first time. It’s weird because you feel like you know people, even if you’ve never met in real life. This was also my first time meeting Dani in real life and I am so happy we finally got the chance to meet in person!

Overall I would say that both the Experience and the Meet Up were a HUGE success. Come back tomorrow to read my recap about the race!