"Taper Time"

I’m back a little earlier than usual to follow up on my training.  The case being I’m on taper and have much more free time now that I’ve cut back on my miles.  I have very mixed feelings about tapering and to be quite honest I dislike it very much.  Unlike most of my running companions who look forward to cutting back their miles after months of training, I cannot comfortably operate in normal society when I’m not running crazy miles and forcing myself to rest is not a good thing.  I had a dream last night that I was running across the country on my way to Boston for a cup of clam chowder, a little “Smokey and the Bandit” influence there but I woke up in a real funk realizing that I won’t be able to do any runs longer than 10 miles for the next week.   I am going to suck it up and make the best of it though, I just keep thinking only 10 more days to taper and once I hit my goal in QC I can spend the rest of the year gobbling up the road until I’ve satisfied my hunger for mileage.

My taper will be consist of two weeks of cutting back on mileage and increasing speedwork.  I had built up to just shy of 100 miles a week, week 3 I cut back to 75, week 2 about 50 and the marathon week I’ll only have about 25 miles in.    The idea behind the plan is to allow my legs to recover with the cutback on miles but also work the speedwork during this recovery period to get the legs all ready to rock the faster pace.  So far it’s felt pretty good, my Tuesday track workouts I nailed all of my splits and finished off with 200 sets clocking in at 27 seconds or about a 3:40 pace.. I was very happy with the times and my quick recovery.   I’ve also been doing a little more cross training with some swimming and lifting just to keep my body active, I’ll cut out most of that towards the middle and end of next week for my final prep.

So with a little over a week away from the big day overall I’m feeling very well about everything, I normally feel like I could have done more but I’m already closing in on 2,000 miles for the year, over 20 races and consistent PRs in every distance I’ve raced in this year so I really feel like I’ve got this one down… it will all be up to my mental toughness the day of and that is something I cannot train for but I am pretty damn stubburn and I’ll play that card to my advantage all day long.