Unlike your regular crew who, with rare exceptions, can only help you at aid stations (and usually only a subset of those), a pacer is by your side on the trail. The rules for pacers are somewhat different than for crew. A pacer can't "mule" for you. That is, they can't carry your stuff and only give it to you when you need it. While they can render assistance in an emergency, they can't physically assist your forward progress.
While a pacer's job is nominally to set your pace, that's not really a task you should delegate. Only you really know how you are feeling and whether pushing will make things better or worse. Many runners actually prefer their pacer run behind them.
What a pacer can do is talk you through it. Or not. Sometimes just having someone else out there on the trail with you is enough. While the symptoms of any given problem are physical, the root cause is often emotional (recall, The Abyss). Going through that while all alone on a remote mountain trail in the middle of the night is tough, to say the least.
A pacer keeps your head in the game. Because they only run a portion of the course, they bring a valuable second opinion that isn't biased by exhaustion and sleep deprivation. Potentially disastrous mistakes of oversight, such as missing a trail junction, are much less likely with two people paying attention to where you are headed. In the haze of pre-dawn hours, it's not uncommon for a runner to stop and then forget which way they were going. A pacer is much less likely to be confused on that point.
If things really do start to turn sour, a pacer may notice it before you do and recommend a solution (or at least suggest you come up with one - ultrarunners are prone to hoping things will get better on their own and it rarely works out that way). Other problems are just easier to solve with another person around. If your batteries go out, having your pacer's headlamp on is obviously a big help while digging your backup out of your pack.
There are two ways to engage "pacers" on long IT projects. The first and most effective is to develop a close mentoring arrangement with another project manager. This individual may also be part of your "crew" (as pacers often are), but at critical segments, they become much more actively involved in the day to day decisions. It could be a simple as agreeing to have lunch 2-3 times a week and talking through the issues. Note that this is not the same thing as having a recreational lunch where you swap stories about how things are going. This is a deliberate, working lunch where you hash out what's working and what isn't.
Another is to formally bring another PM onto the team to assist with a particularly difficult part of the project. This PM serves in an advisory role only (team members are already matrixed, the last thing they need is yet another boss), but they can also be used to help with sending messages up the chain or as a liaison to service providers within or outside the organization who will be contributing to the project.
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