Most towns steer their fall races clear of October 31. Nobody wants runners cramping up the same streets where trick-or-treaters will be canvassing for candy twelve hours later. Westchase does it anyway. The Great West Chase, an annual certified 5K and 10K based in West Park Village, lands squarely on Halloween morning in 2026, and by evening those same blocks belong to kids in costumes.
If you have lived in Westchase for a while, you already sense the pattern. This corner of Tampa does not really take a day off from itself. The Village Green hosts the summer concert series. West Park Village runs its own pub crawl once a year. Now the fall calendar adds a road race to the same footprint that will host trick-or-treating that night, and the neighborhood has quietly figured out how to make it work rather than treating it as a scheduling conflict.
The course you already walk every week
The race starts and finishes at Village Plaza, right at the corner of Brompton Drive and Montague Street, the same intersection most residents pass walking to brunch or the splash park. From there the route heads west along Linebaugh Avenue, turns at Radcliffe Drive, and comes back the way it came. The 5K is one lap of that loop. The 10K is two.
There is a detail buried in the registration rules that only serious runners tend to notice: finish the 10K in under 70 minutes and you can turn around and run the 5K immediately after, stacking two race distances into one Halloween morning. For everyone else, there is a fun run option, which means the same corner that hosts a certified road race also hosts strollers and kids in running shoes a size too big.
What that means practically is this: by the time the race wraps, Village Plaza has already been full of people for hours, and it stays that way. There is no gap between the running crowd clearing out and the trick-or-treating crowd showing up. The corner just keeps going.
The food scene finally has an answer for what comes next
For a long time, finishing a race in West Park Village meant driving somewhere else to eat. That has changed in the last year in a way worth naming specifically, because it changes how a Halloween morning here actually plays out.
MEMO Modern Italian and Cocktail Bar opened on Montague Street in November 2025, inside West Park Village itself. It has become one of those places locals mention when they talk about what is different in the neighborhood lately, and the weekend brunch service, running 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays, lines up almost exactly with when a 10K finisher would be looking for a table. The menu skips the usual chicken-and-waffles brunch script in favor of dishes pulled from its dinner menu, including a stone-oven pizza that regulars order even in the morning. Reservations are worth making, because the restaurant and its bar area fill fast once word gets around on a race morning.
A few minutes away on West Linebaugh Avenue, Big Chicken opened its first Tampa Bay location in 2025, the fast-casual chicken concept backed by Shaquille O'Neal. It is not a sit-down brunch spot, but it solves a different problem: feeding a family fast after a morning of running and costume prep, without a long wait. The menu leans into sandwiches like the Uncle Jerome, built around Nashville hot chicken, alongside hand-spun milkshakes that make for a decent finish-line reward for the kids who did the fun run.
A year ago, this corner did not have MEMO at all, and Big Chicken had only just opened its doors. Neither was part of the neighborhood's rhythm the way both are now. The route has not changed. The neighborhood's ability to feed itself afterward without leaving the immediate area has.
Where the evening picks up
By late afternoon, the race numbers come off and the costumes go on, and the same walkable blocks that hosted a road race a few hours earlier take on their second job. The Bell Tower and the fountains at the center of West Park Village sit right along the parts of the neighborhood built for foot traffic, with the Village Green and its gazebos serving as the kind of open space that naturally pulls families outside once the sun starts to drop. None of this requires an organized event to work. The neighborhood was built walkable enough that people gravitate there anyway once the temperature breaks.
That is really the throughline for the whole day. Westchase did not design West Park Village around a single use. It built porches, alleys, and village greens meant to host a summer concert one week and a pub crawl the next, and on Halloween, apparently, a road race in the morning and a few hundred trick-or-treaters after dark.
A working plan for the day, if you have not mapped it out yet
Residents who have done this before tend to land on some version of the same sequence:
- Register for whichever distance fits, the 5K, 10K, or fun run, and get to Village Plaza with enough buffer before the start that parking near Brompton and Montague is not a scramble.
- Book a brunch table at MEMO for late morning rather than showing up and hoping, since the post-race crowd has caught on to the timing.
- Swing by Big Chicken instead if the plan is faster and less formal, especially with younger kids who are not going to sit through a sit-down brunch in a half-costume.
- Use the afternoon lull for the actual costume assembly, since the morning is already spoken for.
- Head back toward the Village Green or the Bell Tower once it gets dark, where the sidewalks are already set up for exactly this kind of foot traffic.
None of this requires advance planning beyond a reservation and a parking strategy, but skipping the sequence entirely tends to mean either missing the race start or showing up to a full restaurant with a costume half zipped.
What this says about the neighborhood, not just the day
A single overlapping event on one Saturday would not mean much on its own. What makes it worth writing about is that it is not really an overlap at all anymore. Two new restaurants opened within blocks of the same intersection that anchors a certified road race, and neither business had to be built around Halloween specifically. They just happened to land in a village center dense enough that a morning race and an evening trick-or-treat can share the same few streets without anyone needing to reroute anything.
That density is the thing to notice if you are new here or thinking about how this part of Tampa actually functions day to day. Westchase was platted as a single master-planned community over three decades ago, and West Park Village was built later as its walkable core, modeled after Hyde Park's older street grid. The neighborhood has spent that time filling in the gaps between the concert series, the pub crawl, and now a food scene that can actually support a morning like this one without anyone driving off toward Citrus Park or Town 'n' Country to eat.
If you already live here, you know this is not really about the race or even about Halloween. It is about a village center that keeps finding new ways to be used on the same footprint it started with. Derek McDonald tracks these shifts in Westchase and the surrounding neighborhoods as part of following the market here day to day, and if you want a closer look at how the area has developed around West Park Village, the Westchase neighborhood page has more on what the community looks like block by block. For the race itself, registration and the full course map are up now for anyone who wants to lock in a start time before the corral fills.
