Chilly rain shivered the silver of Danie Matusik's space blanket as she walked slowly toward the deserted starting line of the Little Rock Marathon.
In the distance behind her, lurid blips of orange or green stood out from the drizzling grayness, small, bright spots suggesting the intermittent stream of limping, loping, cheerful and/or desperately focused runners crossing Scott Street on Third, a mere mile left in their 26.2.
Matusik's marathon was over. And she felt chagrin. "I didn't do well today," she said.
She'd clocked 3:42:13.6, a pace of 8:28 per mile for 26.2 miles, and she felt like a dud.
Failing to reach a personal record (PR) is a notorious affliction of the swift. But Little Rock hadn't dealt the 43-year-old Matusik some standard-issue runners' dismay March 1.
She got a special, double-whammy disappointment reserved for generous people who volunteer to lead a pace team.
The Little Rock Marathon provides 20 pace groups, each with two volunteer leaders. Each pacer agrees to carry a long dowel rod bearing a little sign while running a steady rate so that strangers hoping to finish in, say, 3 hours and 30 minutes can simply stick with them and succeed.
Racers can drop in and out of pace groups on the course without obligation, and there's no charge for the service.
At the marathon expo Saturday, pace-team organizer Melody Muldrow reported that all 20 groups -- for finish times ranging from 3:05 to 8 hours -- had two leaders apiece, except the 3:30 and 3:15.
Later, though, Matusik was recruited to pace the 3:30, with Jonathan Boils of Little Rock.
"He was able to bring the group in, but ... I was there until about the halfway point," Matusik said, clutching the ends of the space blanket and a sack of her
possessions, including a banana. Gooseflesh dimpled her bare legs.
A resident of Chelsea, Mich., she has run 46 marathons and paced seven. She usually paces 3:40 groups, which is comfortable for her: 3:30 is "a doable time for me, but it's fast. And I'm nursing a little bit of an injured foot, and the hills, the cold -- all of it. It's a hard race.
"I came up a little bit short today. It happens. It's a challenge.
"Typically pacing's very rewarding. I'm going to feel bad about it because, I ... you know, you set out to help other people and if you ... Well, it's one thing if you fall short of your own goals, but if you're out there to help other people ...
"Ach. Frustrating."
Other racers March 1 were far less eager to blame a pacer for anything that might or might not have gone wrong on the course.
A reporter overheard a finisher describing how the leader of a pace group she'd followed had "lost it" about mile 19. But asked to explain what went wrong, this out-of-towner not only refused to elaborate, she withheld her name as well, so no one could trace her complaint back to that pacer.
"You know what? They volunteer their time to be out there," she said.
SERVICE CORPS
"I couldn't imagine actually being a pacer. I think it would be really, really difficult," said Katie Gordon of Sherwood, while walking with Wade Gordon away from the finish line of her first marathon.
Once or twice she had felt claustrophobic on the River Trail when a pace group swarmed her; but seeing the 6:30 pacer late in the race was inspiring.
"I was just hoping to finish in 7:30, so that made me feel good, and I was staying right with them," she said.
Meanwhile, Wade chose to run with the six-hour group (which the race website says was led by Chris Shuptrine of Bigelow and David Edwards of Morrilton), and "I liked it. But each to his own. I enjoyed it."
On the way to his 5:58 finish, he appreciated "just to have someone to push you, to make sure you stay on track the best that you could."
And he liked listening to the strangers babbling around him.
STEADY FREDDY
Gary Taylor, whose Go! Running store sponsored the pacers, explained during Saturday's expo that pacers are assigned to times at least 30 minutes slower than their recent marathon finishes. All of Little Rock's pacers had more than three finishes under their belts; most had 10 or more, and some had hundreds.
"We always say you have to be steady in a marathon, and these guys are actually experts at that through their experience and their watches," Taylor said.
Each pacer has his own strategy, Muldrow said, but all are expected to hit the marks printed on timing bracelets, mile by mile.
Pacers might go slower on an uphill and a little faster on a downhill, but the level of effort remains the same, Taylor said.
"It's practice," Muldrow said.
SUCH A DEAL
Elaine Gimblet of North Little Rock paced the seven-hour, early-start group March 1 with Jayme Sturgeon of Maumelle. It was Gimblet's 46th marathon and her third as a pace team.
So pacing is rough?
"Now listen, we get so much great stuff. We get the free entry; we get socks, we get shirts, we get the pacer breakfast; we get parties. I mean, it's fantastic," she said. "It's the best deal in town."
The pacers are fed breakfast on Saturday before the marathon, this year by the Capital Hotel.
"Everything served on silver serving trays," Gimblet said. "Oh, it's fantastic, wonderful. And then people speak, give us a little inspiration."
Typically a marathon takes her six hours, so when she and husband Ron paced the seven-hour group in 2014, it felt very slow.
On the other hand, "it's not that easy, because you have to dress properly to not go very fast. ... You can't run fast enough to stay warm because you've got to stay on pace," she said. "It's a 16-minute pace. You can't run that slow."
She checked herself at every mile marker using MapMyRun, an app on her phone, and one of the pace bracelets printed with various timing charts and handed out at the expo.
"Ron checks every half mile," she said. "I do the talking, he does the checking."
In 2014, the Gimblets started with about a dozen runners, but after a freak storm hit, most of their people dropped out, got on the bus or ran ahead.
"We had one lady went zero to 26.2 with us," Gimblet said, "and she talked about the big steak she was going to have the whole time.
"And she thought we should buy it for her. We were like, 'Wait a minute. Shouldn't you buy that for us?'"
SUPPORT WORKS
Doug Mueller of Hartland, Wis., qualified for the Boston Marathon on March 1, and he credited the pacers who helped him.
"The group was for 3:55, and it was a guy and a girl. I forget their names. They were just awesome. They were encouraging the whole time, they talked the whole time. Especially the last eight to 10 miles, they were constantly saying, 'Hey, hang in there, you're doing great, nice pace.'"
The race website lists the 3:55 pacers as 37-year-old Katie Helms of Fayetteville, veteran of 50 marathons, and Brian Wright, 37, of Battlefield, Mo., veteran of 104.
"I would have never made it" without them, Mueller said.
ActiveStyle on 03/09/2015