Portland Marathon Pace Team

Each year during the Portland Marathon, Team Red Lizard provides pace teams to lead runners to their target finish times.  This is a huge effort for the club, as it requires a large number of runners to be able to hold a consistent effort for the 26.2 mile course that will get people in within a minute of their target time.  The model used to date has been having a group of 2 runners pace each half of the marathon for the following finish times (average pace per mile in parentheses).

3:00 (6:52/mile)
3:05 (7:03/mile)
3:10 (7:15/mile)
3:20 (7:35/mile)
3:25 (7:49/mile)
3:30 (8:00/mile)
3:35 (8:12/mile)
3:40 (8:23/mile)
3:50
4:05
4:20
4:40 (10:40/mile)
5:00 (11:27/mile)
6:33

This is always one of the highlight volunteer activities our club members participate in.  If you are interested in helping out this October, please keep an eye on the message board, or for more information, contact TRL’s Director of Pacing, Tom Fuchs at thomas@redlizardrunning.com

Marathon Expo

To provide information to racers about our pace team, TRL hosts a booth at the Portland Marathon Sports and Fitness Expo at the Hilton Hotel (SW 6th Ave and SW Salmon St.) in downtown Portland.  A thread will be posted prior to the event for pacers to sign up for various shifts, but typically the days/times are 11AM-8PM on Friday and 9AM-7PM on Saturday.

At the booth, pacers explain the “even effort” splits they plan to run, as well as answer pacing and course questions from participants. It’s a great opportunity to talk marathons with tons of very nice people. Some have lots of marathon experience and some have none. So you get all kinds of questions. The one constant is the positive energy from everyone. It’s a blast!

Marathon participants can download pace bands with course specific (terrain adjusted) mile splits here: Portland Marathon pace bands 2017(pdf)