This morning I helped pace the 1:30 group at the Halloween Half Marathon. Had a great time and since I had no interest in racing, this was an enjoyable way to get in a nice medium-long weekend run (plus free shirt and race entry!). I ran into Keith Barton last week at the SoJo Half Marathon and he mentioned that he had something come up and wouldn't be able to pace the 1:30 group he was slated to do for Walter at this weekend's Halloween Half. I told him I'd be happy to fill-in if Walter didn't already have a replacement lined-up. I later spoke with Walter a couple days later and got the part. I struggled to find a good costume that would be conducive for running, but eventually landed on an old, homemade, bengal tiger out-fit my grandma had made some 30+ years ago for my dad. I spent some time Friday night sewing the tail back on and re-enforcing it with some safety pins. I worried that it might be a pain in the rear flopping all over the place while I ran, but it would have been pretty lame to have been a tiger with no tail. So I pinned it up out of the way the best I could and decided to take my chances. I wore a turtleneck and tight pants underneath and the whole package ended up working out great! It was nice and toasty-warm and not too restrictive at all at the slight sub 7-minute pace we were running. I joked with my group that I should probably run dressed like this more often. Rob Rohde was my pacing partner. He was dressed-up as the 2010 Team Radio Shack edition of Lance Armstrong and even had his syringe of EPO! He was great to run with. While waiting for the buses at the University Mall, I met a fellow FRB'er, RachelT. She had an awesome Link (from Zelda) costume. After waiting for what seemed an eternity to load the buses and then another eternity up at the (cold) start-line for the race to begin, the race got underway at about 9AM. No need to get into a lot of details about the run. It went pretty much exactly as planned. We started with a fairly sizeable group that slowly shrank, as was to be expected. Rob and I kept the group within a couple of seconds of the targeted pace the whole way. It was fun to just be cruising along at an easy pace, chatting with Rob, and encouraging all the folks in our group. The most painful part was listening to Rob's lame Halloween jokes each mile mark! :) ...Just kidding Rob, some of them really were funny. It was cool to see some of our runners working so hard to stay on pace and gratifying to see some of them achieve it. At the same time, it was a little heart-breaking when someone started to fade off the back. Your first reaction was to slow down with them and try and bring them back up to group, but you have to stay on pace for the good of the rest of the group. After the finish, we got lots of thank-you's from our runners for having paced them. It was a fun time. I definitely look forward to more pacing gigs in the future. Great way to spend a Saturday morning this time of year. | 