Maybe it’s because runners are traumatized from Marathon Weekend registration, maybe it’s because people are broke after registering for Marathon Weekend and Princess Half Marathon weekends, maybe it’s because airfares are (pun intended) sky-high during the school vacation week, or maybe it’s because some annual passes are in a blackout period, but the Springtime Surprise weekend was not an instant sell-out.

As of 3pm on on registration day (August 23, 2022) only the 5K is sold out. The rest of the races are still available and up for grabs – including the 3-race Surprise Challenge! That’s great news for anyone who is on the fence or likes to sleep late. No doubt the races will eventually sell out, but it looks like everyone gets a chance at the fun this time!

Events and themes are as follows:

• runDisney Springtime Surprise Yoga – (Thursday, April 13 at 5 am) this time it will be held at Disney’s Hollywood Studios
• Disney Pixar Cars 5K (Friday, April 14 at 5 am) start at EPCOT
• Disney Pixar Monsters 10K (Saturday, April 15 at 5 am) start at EPCOT
• Disney Pixar Toy Story 10-miler (Sunday, April 16 5 am) start at EPCOT

Of course there is a challenge option!

• runDisney Springtime Surprise Challenge all 3 races! The theme is Finding Nemo and you’ll get all 3 medals plus the special Finding Nemo challenge medal for 19.3 combined miles!

Having not fully recovered from the Marathon Weekend registration fiasco myself, I hopped into the registration queue this morning, as so many Disney runners do, on multiple devices. The first device to get into registration was my phone, so I breezed through the form (or so I thought). I missed the T-shirt size field on the form (like I always do) and had to scroll back. Then I got distracted / tripped up by the merchandise that is available at registration for the first time in a while:

I might have scrolled through the form a few times while trying to make up my mind…. but anyway I got my registration in with a sigh of relief, and only a bit of adrenaline in my veins. Then I got the confirmation screen and realized, somehow, that I had registered my daughter instead of myself. (Insert shriek of terror here.)

I’ve heard of varying degrees of success attempting to contact support for runDisney. I guess I’ll be finding out about the process first hand now. There’s a contact form on the runDisney site. I tried filling it out about 4 times on my phone and 3 times on my computer, and got an error message every time. Most annoying is that you can’t copy and paste anything into the form. After typing my sob story to the support team 7 times, I gave up.

There is support phone number listed on the runDisney site. I called, sat on hold for a few minutes and then got a message saying that there were no agents available, and to please leave a message. So – we’ll see how this goes. I’ll update this post with the results as soon as I hear something.

Update: August 25 – After a short game of phone tag with the runDisney technical support team, everything is resolved!

In the meantime, I have 3 new costumes to sort out!