I was a pacer for the Halloween Half marathon yesterday. A friend of mine asked me if I wanted to do it as they had some open spots and I thought it sounded like fun, so I ended up pacing the 1:55 group. I really love this course and think that the race could be a great one, however there were several issues that they need to get worked out. First of all I waited in line for about an hour in the cold to get on the bus, and then once we were up there the race didn't start on time and there was a lot of confusion. It seemed like they didn't have enough buses because they were still arriving as the race was starting.
I actually really enjoyed running this race and had a lot of fun, but I was really frustrated because I wanted to go faster and it was tough keeping the pace at 8:47, especially on the downhill. I did get to wear a really cool pacer shirt though and that was fun. :) There were a few people that stayed with us most of the race, but for the most part most of the people either dropped off or went faster. I'm really not sure if I will do this again because I really just wanted to race. It was a lot of fun though hanging out with some of the bloggers and seeing a lot of friends, so that made it a fun morning, and I got a nice hug from Jun.
We came in 3 minutes under our pace, but the course was short. In fact, the mile markers were totally messed the whole race. The race director seemed to think that us Utahns weren't very good pacers because we weren't able to take all of this into account. Haha. I had no idea the course was short and I was going strictly off of my Garmin. I knew the mile markers were totally off. All of the pacers I talked to came in about 3 minutes early.
The worst part of the day though was having to wait in the line for the bus. They only had two buses to take everyone back to University Mall. Lame. | 