LITTLE ROCK — Tracy Woodie didn't suspect anything out of the ordinary when she and boyfriend Jeff Martens stopped to embrace family and friends near the end of the Little Rock Marathon course.
But there was a secret motive in the day's final pit-stop: While hugging his best friend staked outside the Peabody Hotel, Martens was also slyly receiving a ring he had picked out for Woodie.
Less than a mile later, they were engaged.
"When we crossed the finish line, I immediately started crying, I was just overwhelmed," Woodie, 37, recalled by phone Monday as she and Martens, 43, drove back home to Oklahoma City. "Then he pulled me off to the side, turned around and dropped down to one knee. He proposed and I said yes. And the rest was history."
For Martens, the impending proposal turned out to be good motivation. The last mile of most marathons are long, interminable treks, he said, but knowing what was coming as he gripped the ring in his fist kept him going.
"This mile just sped by," Martens said. "I was so excited about getting to the end there. And it couldn't have worked out better."
The surprise engagement was the perfect cap to an already emotional day, Woodie said.
The couple - who met in local running clubs in Oklahoma - have each done marathons before on their own, but Sunday's race was the first time they did so together. And the reason wasn't solely so Martens could pop the question when they reached the finish.
Martens' best friend's fiancee, 31-year-old Amanda Rundell, took her own life last year. Baffled and traumatized by the death, Martens and Woodie decided to form a team to raise money and awareness for suicide prevention while paying tribute to the friend they had lost.
"We just felt like we wanted to run in her honor and in memory of her," Woodie said.
That meant the usually faster Martens would stay by his girlfriend's side throughout. Sticking together proved the best way to convey the message of the team, named Rundell's Runners in their friend's honor, while also the perfect setup for the finish line proposal.
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"The suicide was such a low point in all of our lives and I wanted to kind of represent the ending of the marathon as the start of our new life and something positive," Martens said. "I knew that proposing on this day would be something we could always refer back to whenever life gets tough ... We can always go back and recall the feelings and the happiness and the positive things that this race meant for us and did for us and for others."
The proposal, which was captured by a Little Rock Marathon photographer, became a hit online. In less than a day, the image of Martens kneeling before a shocked Woodie, ring in hand, garnered more than 900 likes and dozens of comments on the race Facebook account.
Woodie, who officially finished one second ahead of her fiancee at 4:47:16, said the proposal couldn't have come at a better time. It reflected their love of running, it came as they honored their friend and it was a complete surprise.
"I know Amanda would have been just so excited for us," Woodie said. "She really admired the fact that we could run such long distances. In the excitement of our future, I guess it dawned on me that this was just the perfect time for him to have done this ... He did really well, I have to say."