What is a pacer?

What is a pacer? Like with all things in ultrarunning, the definition of ‘pacer’ has been pushed to a new extreme. It’s no longer some 1980s track coach with a whistle, yelling at you from a car window to pick it up, pointing ferociously at their stop watch. It’s not a more modern version of the marathon pacer holding a sign up for a three-hour or three-and-a-half-hour finish.

It’s something else. 

“Follow me,” that pacer’s face encourages with calm confidence, “and I will get you to the finish line on time.” 

Pacers are fellow runners who have volunteered their time to pace people aiming for a ballpark goal time in the 26.2-mile marathon distance. In ultradistances (technically, any race or run greater than the 26.2-mile marathon), pacers have responsibilities greater than helping their runner get to the finish line on time. Depending on length, terrain and environmental conditions, pacers may have to help the runner navigate, to remind them to eat, drink, or take a trail nap. They’ll likely have to encourage at times, and at times when safety is in question to dissuade. They’ll have to read the runner’s temperature and make adjustments. 

They do all of this while running themselves. Pacing involves part art, a little bit of science, and a whole lot of heart.

Many ultras in this country allow pacers to join 100K (66.6-mile) races halfway through a 100K (66.6 miles) races or anything longer. Typically, pacers are not used for shorter ultra distances, although each race has its own unique set of rules. For the 100s, pacers are allowed to join their runners at a specified aid station or crew station. This pacer can stay with them for ten or 50 miles or anywhere in between.

Elite ultrarunners may have several pacers lined up to trade off for specific sections. They may need someone fast and upbeat for the finish, or someone who knows the course well enough to navigate the trickier twists and turns of herd paths and rock scrambles. A fresh pacer may bring energy to an exhausted competitor, or have the specific expertise that a section of the route requires. It all depends on the runner, the race, and the accessibility the runner has to pacers eager to join the experience.

Thrilled and terrified

I’m not all that organized or planned. I’m not an elite trail runner or ultrarunner. I’m a late bloomer to discovering these ridiculously long and grueling races. But I could not be more in love with the challenges they pose, the beauty and intimacy of the environments that these courses take me to. 

I’m completely captivated by the community of people ultras attract. I’m attracted by, their rawness and vulnerability. I appreciate not just their love of nature but also their willingness to help their fellow competitors. Their fellowship is more tribal than it is individual, more team-oriented than winner-takes-all. They sport more modern primitive tattoos, piercings and hand-sewn and repaired garments than facelifts, Botox and flashy, expensive gear.

When I find something I’m passionate about — an author, a songwriter, a sport, a story — I dive in head first, hold my breath, and swim to the depths, I want to uncover every morsel of information, any clues, any artifacts I can.

Within a year and a half, I went from running in a 50K to a 50-miler to a 100-miler to a mountainous 100-miler, to the Moab 240-mile run. I’ve been a runner my entire life, but prior to this ultra-era I had never gone further than a road marathon, which at the time, seemed like the outer edge of what was possible.

When I jumped into the lottery for Moab, which only can take 220 people, I didn’t think I stood a chance. When my name was actually pulled out of the hat, I was both thrilled and absolutely terrified. 

What in god’s name had I done?

My support sisters

I told no one. I went to work, quietly training, researching, reading every race report, listening to every podcast, following past competitors on social media, learning to read maps and elevation charts, watching crude YouTube videos made by runners doing the Moab 240. They ran themselves into altered states, dropped out, lost their sight or fell..

Awestruck though I was. I knew what I would need right away. I would need a pacer.

I knew who it was. It was a woman whom I had run cross-country with at New Paltz High School. Someone who was more comfortable in nature than in this loud, overbuilt, concretized modern world. She was a thru-hiker and a masseuse, a mother, a runner, a naturalist and an adventurer. She was probably more capable of running the 240 than I was.

Guess what? She said yes! 

Not only that, but she asked her sister, another woman I had run with in the Shawangunk Mountains as a youngster, someone whose father I had been close to and run with. 

The overlapping of miles and trails and lives and memories started creating a map bigger than the Moab 240. For me, it was a bit like taking an orienteering course tracing my life backward.

Embracing the adventure

Shiloh Pileggi and Jesse Coree Sarubi, both born and bred in New Paltz, have had a long history of big mountain climbing adventures in Wyoming and Colorado with their family as children and with their children as adults.

Altitude does not faze them. Dirt does not faze them. Sleeping outside on the edge of a cliff does not faze them. Neither does trekking through the dark in the desert, in mountain streams, or on bald summits. They’ve had their share of traversing technical rock rims, of encountering deranged hunters, and of facing hoof-stomping elk. 

They’ve been to the edges of human existence and back. They have a deep confidence in their own bodies and souls, and know how to keep moving through nature’s infinite obstacle course. 

Both selflessly and enthusiastically embraced this adventure with me. They divided between them which sections each would pace, when they would trade off, what equipment and gear was necessary. Their focus was on how best to get me through miles 115 to 240. 

I was a New Paltz lowlander with minimal to no experience at altitude except the Bear 100-mile race at 10,000 feet in the Wasatch mountain range in northern Utah two weeks before Moab. Shiloh coached me on how to shuffle gently to keep my heart rate down, how to exhale deeply to allow the oxygen to snap back in. Jesse chatted effervescently as we did 30-second pickup runs through the desert, followed by a minute easy running and then a minute hard.

After a story and another burst of running came an endless symphony of laughter and another story about finding rocks shaped like hearts. A New Paltz father was right there with us in our hearts, watching over our pilgrimage, ensuring our safe arrival. 

Shiloh would march me up the mountains to heights and elevation I’d never encountered before, regaling me with her and Jesse’s childhood escapade sneaking out from an adult party and finding a cave in the Shawangunk Mountains to sleep in with their younger siblings. They had awakened to a massive search party.

Shiloh encouraged me to touch my face after I caressed the silky white bark of an aspen tree. It was a natural sunblock, she said . 

As it darkened, Shiloh would tell me to wait on a rock near the edge of a ravine while she ran back to pull other women who had gotten lost back on course. She could tell by the direction of their headlamps that they were off-course. “Women helping women,” she would say, as though we hadn’t been climbing for 24 hours without a break in the middle of the La Sal mountains, in freezing temperatures with few to no course markings. 

It wasn’t a you-wash-the-dishes-and-I’ll-dry-them type of teamwork. This one had more gravitas. This is what Shiloh does. This is who she is. A warrior, a heroine, a mythical creature. 

At one point, the fatigue and energy output left me with almost no reserves. I started to cry. Not a whimper or a sniffling cry. An entire-body, cleaved-in-half, bone-marrow-shredding type of cry.

I felt so grateful for my children. My two boys were there crewing for me, but I missed my daughter, who is studying abroad in Greece. “It’s not bad. It’s not a bad cry, Shiloh,” I tried to explain. I didn’t want to worry her. I was just overcome. 

“I know,” she said, grabbing my shoulders squarely and pulling me into her. “It’s hard to let our babies go out into the world. But you’re a wonderful mother, and she’ll be back soon.”

Caressing the soul

That’s not in the pacer’s manual. 

Nor is a description of what takes place on mile 232 when anyone left on the course (almost half of the 211 people who started the race had dropped out by this point) was sleep-deprived, dog-tired, confused, hungry, hallucinating and just all-around unhinged. This is where Jesse stepped in, guiding not only myself but two other racers down the treacherous Porcupine Rim bike path, down-climbing on slick rock perched on the edge of a mesa overlooking the Colorado River. It was two o’clock in the morning, and the stars which had been glistening were now tucked behind sandstone wall. 

Jesse careened down the path like a sheepherder, tucking us into formation, backing one of the men away from the cliff’s edge, bringing up the rear for when someone lagged behind — as always a ray of sunshine in an otherwise dark night of the soul. 

Our blisters had blisters. Our legs were buckling beneath us. Our stomachs had gone south a hundred miles earlier, and our body temperature could no longer regulate itself.

But Jesse was in charge of our spirits. Jesse could not cure any of those things, but she could walk beside us, have us believe that if we trusted her each step we were taking was bringing us closer to the finish line, the promised land inside our souls, on the outskirts of Moab.

“Cliff to your right, hug the left, staircase down the middle, sand wash over here …. Would anyone like a cashew? An Advil? Erin, are you drinking? I can hear the river. We’re getting closer.” 

Jesse was like a run-whisperer, lulling us forward, allowing me to pause for a minute dirt-nap, my head supported by the root of a juniper tree. 

What is a pacer? in my experience, a pacer is someone who walks or runs beside you, sometimes in silence, other times in wonder, constantly caressing that outer edge of your soul, saying without words, You can do this. You’re stronger than you know.

Thank you, Shiloh and Jesse, for being the most incredible pacers, the strongest women, and the most protective and fierce guides out there on the 135 miles of trails that led us through at least a hundred different lifetimes.