I am a bucket lister. I was doing a "bucket list" long before the movie came out. I was inspired by a Readers Digest article I read for a college class in the late 1980's or early '90's (which I have not been able to find since) about a guy who made a list of things he wanted to do before he died while still in high school and made a career out of it. At the time the article was written, he'd been doing it 40 years or so. He would get sponsors for his adventures, write about them and sell the articles, and also do speaking engagements to earn his living. Although I haven't made a living at it, I have done some really cool things in my almost 47 years on the planet. The last thing I had on my list that was related to running was "run a Marathon", which I did on September 14, 2013.
I needed some other goal, but running more Marathons or going further doesn't really interest me. Frankly, I got bored running that long. Maybe if I could run 26.2 in 2 hours....but I can't, and I'm not willing to put the time in to be a fast runner, especially for that long of a distance. I found my goal while watching the IMT Des Moines Marathon about a month after I finished the Wabash Trace Marathon. I went to cheer on several friends who were running, and couldn't believe how close the pacers were to their goal times. They were all coming through right on the button. Since I get as much or more satisfaction from helping others accomplish their goals than I do from meeting my own, I decided to make being a race pacer my next goal.
Even though I'm not a runner I do have a lot of friends who are, so I reached out to some of them, mainly through the GOATz (Greater Omaha Area Trail Runners) Facebook page, to find out what I needed to do to become a race pacer. The consensus was that I needed to run a lot of races to establish what my expected base time would be, and then after a few years of that, I might be able to find a spot in a race that needed a pacer. Since I really liked the distance of the one half Marathon that I had done (2013 Drake Relays Half Marathon), I decided to research the topic thoroughly and focus on doing as many halfs as I could over the next couple of years so I could qualify to be a pacer. It didn't exactly work out that way.
Shortly after I decided to become a race pacer, I saw another Facebook post from my local running club, Capital Striders, that they needed a three hour pacer for the 2014 Drake Relays Half Marathon. I sent a message to the contact person along the lines of, "I know I'm not qualified, but I would like to do this in the future, so if you could give me any tips, that would be great. Oh, and if you don't find anyone else, I could give it a shot". A few days later I found out that I would be the three hour pacer on April 27, 2014. Let the adventure begin!
