I needed time to have some reflection and have some conversations with myself and my coach before I felt ready to communicate this experience of what it was like to be a pacer. 

It’s a question that has come up a lot. How I explain it is that a pacer is someone who jumps into a race with an agenda of hitting a certain time with the goal of setting up the race to run fast. It takes out the element of strategy until the end, when it matters. It allows everyone to change their focus from conserving energy, jockeying for position, to spending it effectively over the entire race, so they can run as fast as they can. 

In the case of the Texas Qualifier, that time was the Olympic Trials standard for the 1500m. It was my job to go the first 1000m and set that hot pace for women who had come from all over the country to strive to hit that mark. It was incredibly nerve racking. Pace making and rabbiting feels like a lot of responsibility and I put a lot of expectation on myself to do it perfectly. 

I approached it as a pacing job and I kinda set myself up with the wrong mindset, looking back retrospectively. It was really a 1000m race. The reason I say that is that is that after about 400m, when I should have been putting my nose to the grind to keep the momentum going forwards, I was thinking about keeping things even. That’s not to say that you want to be yo-yoing, but I started to fall off and the weight and magnitude of what I had built up in my head got to me and I felt pretty overwhelmed. 

I kept moving forward to 900m, but that’s when I decided to step off - with 100m of my 1000m to go. I could feel the women coming up behind me and they clearly wanted to move. I didn’t want to be in their way, especially as I was off pace. I was upset with myself. I felt ashamed. I assumed I had disappointed them. That was really hard and I didn’t know how to handle those emotions. It knocked my confidence but it didn’t deter me. 

I was right sided by my wonderful coach and team. I had another job to do the next day pacing the development 1500 and I was gonna do it with confidence and I was gonna do it well. I feel fortunate that I had that opportunity to redeem myself to myself and whoever I imagined was watching. It was honestly totally different. I knew what I needed to do, I wasn’t nervous and I got it done. Overall I’m glad I had the chance at a high level with elite athletes. I’m learning to tell myself I deserve to be there.