Runners who sought to compete in a Colorado Springs Halloween 5K and half marathon Saturday morning were left in the dust with disappointment and outrage after out-of-state organizers blamed poor execution on equipment being stolen.

“It’s supposed to be an experience,” said Chriselda Reyes, who drove more than five hours from Amarillo, Texas, to run the race with her friend. “That’s what you pay for. Why pay for that when you could go out and jog on your own for free?”

She and her friend paid a $25 signup fee for The Halloween Half & 5K, with the promise of Halloween-themed medals and T-shirts. They bought costumes and paid for babysitters, she said. An avid runner, Reyes looked forward to the crowds of people, vendors and themed banners she’d experienced at other races.

Instead, she said, they found homeless people camped out at the starting point, Dorchester Park on Nevada Avenue south of downtown, unknowledgeable organizers who wore no identification and no marked route to the finish at El Pomar Youth Sports Park.

Reyes remembered seeing only two event organizers at the starting line, where hundreds of runners looked as lost as she felt.

“‘My advice would be to run next to the river,’” Reyes remembered one organizer saying, admitting he didn’t know very much about the trail.

The Utah-based organizer of the Halloween Half Marathon announced via the event’s Facebook page that “some dastardly person stole our vehicle that had all the medals for the race,” Friday night. The trailer was parked outside Gold’s Gym at 1409 N. Academy Blvd., organizer Cindi Hill told Gazette news partner KKTV.

“We’d been loading back into the gym to get the rest of the stuff and came out and the U-Haul was gone,” Hill told KKTV.

Attempts to contact Event Solutions Management, the parent company that hosts the marathons, were unsuccessful.

Dozens of participants voiced their displeasure online.

“This was like the Fyre Festival of races,” read one comment, referring to the fraudulent 2017 luxury music festival that was to be held on the Bahamian island of Great Exuma. “What a scam! Lucky we realized what was about to happen when they dropped us off at a homeless camp. We got back on the bus to take us back to our car. Totally waste of time and money.”

Others cast doubt that the theft ever occurred, stating that they received medals at the end of the race.

“So were the medals actually stolen, or did they ‘reappear’ after some of us had already finished the 5K and left the finish area?” read a Facebook comment. “And the shirts, were they stolen too or did they just run out of them at packet pickup?”

The Halloween Half was held nationwide in several cities, including Little Rock, Ark., where particpants voiced similar complaints as in Colorado Springs.

“You couldn’t even tell exactly where the finish was there was no banner or nothing,” said an Arkansas half marathon runner, who also asked not to be named. “At the end it was cups of water and donuts. That’s it.”