Disneyland Half Marathon Cigna Blogger Meetup

During the Disneyland Half Marathon weekend, the presenting sponsor, Cigna held a Blogger Meetup at the Grand Californian Hotel. This was my second opportunity to attend a Cigna blogger meet up during a runDisney race weekend. I went to the meetup in January at Walt Disney World and hung out with old and new friends.  This year I was excited to see friends that I had made from last January’s event.

Lunch

We were served lunch and had the chance to mingle with each other and our team mates.  We were going to play an Amazing Race-type challenge at Disney California Adventure Park. We were given the rules and our guidebook, and envelope of money to be used for some of the clues and a camera.

The Amazing Race

After our lunch, we headed over to the park to assemble as teams and begin our scavenger hunt. It was an incredibly hot day with temperatures in the 90’s so we knew how important it was going to be to stay hydrated since we just ran the 10K earlier that morning and most of us had the half marathon to run the next morning.

With our clues in hand we headed over to Paradise Pier to begin our challenges. Our adventure was only going to last for 90 minutes so we had to get as much done as we could in that time. Throughout the race we had to capture images and video of our challenges and tweet them out using specific hashtags and then the judges back at the hotel were going to tally up our scores based on what we tweeted. I oversaw photographing and tweeting. I would hand Sue my phone to take the photo and then I tweeted out the specific task and hashtags. It was a lot of fun and a lot of work at the same time! My phone was starting to get hot and the screen was dimming!

At one point, we needed to find shelter in a shady area and solve some of the riddles in the book.  We also needed to plan a strategy for our next moves while cooling down from being in the sun.

Dessert And Winner Announcement

After the time was up we had to return to the location of our lunch, where dessert was provided along with much needed refreshing ice tea and water. And we had a special opportunity to get our photographs taken with Mickey and Minnie Mouse!

I really enjoy these games. I especially liked the tweeting element to it this time because not only were people in the park curious about what we were doing and asking us; but now those tweets are out on Twitter and the messages will live on and may continue to spark curiosity. I will make it a point to re-tweet one or two a week as throwback Thursday items to regenerate the content again.

Thanks Cigna for the great swag bag and another wonderful opportunity to share with others the importance of living a healthy lifestyle.  I also love the opportunity to meet other bloggers and then seeing them again at future events!