LITTLE ROCK, Ark. – Every year thousands of people flood the Capital City for the Little Rock Marathon, and small businesses feel the effects in a big way.

“It was great, it was a lot of fun,” Rod Robey, a runner in the marathon said.

Many like Rod Robey and Christine Soh made their way to local restaurants like the Root Café, causing business to boom.

“We look at numbers from the year before and we are like, okay what times are we the busiest, when does it get slow, when do we need extra hands, and so we are truly preparing for this for quite a few weeks if not the whole year after we have the last one,” Kimberly Foret, manager at the Root Café said.

Foret said this weekend is the busiest weekend of the year, and they start preparing weeks in advance, by adding extra crew members.

On Saturday, Kimberly said they hit record numbers in sales.

“We made $11,000 for our sales and that’s really big for us, that’s $1,000 or a little bit more per hour…… so yeah, we start seeing it immediately,” said Foret.

Rod Robey and Christine Soh are in from Los Angeles, California and they participated in the races Sunday.

After they finished the race, they made sure to stop by the café they passed to support local businesses.

“You are putting the support back into the community, rather than giving it to the bigger corporations, of course it is just more for the economic impact,” runner in the Little Rock Half Marathon, Christine Soh said.