I'm happy to say I made it to the taper succesfully! I'm not so happy to say I've failed pretty epicly at my first week of the taper. Mostly due to real life happening... which is unavoidable. A combination of work travel that comes with some pretty exhausting long days on my feet and grieving from the recent loss of our most fabulous and amazing dog Sunni its been a difficult week. I've done my best to just listen to my body and be smart and train when and if I can. Thats resulted in no swimming this week, a 7 mile run, a 3.5 mile run, and two one hour spins on a hotel bike. Thats it. A grand total of 3.5 hours of training. So on the plus side I certainly haven't overtrained during the first week of the taper, but I am definitely at risk of undertraining. Does it matter? I don't know... hopefully not. Everyone says there are no fitness gains to be made during the taper so perhaps I'll be ok. Maybe this will give my running legs some time to heal up a bit. We'll see what happens when I start training again in earnest next week how my legs feel. My hope is that they feel sharp and I'll end up holding myself back to reduced efforts. My fear is that I'll feel really rusty!
My plan for the remaining two weeks of the taper is pretty simple. No long AND hard efforts. Just some mid length efforts with some intervals sprinkled in to keep me sharp. I'll taper my longest bike to two hours long mostly at Ironman pace with some brief periods of slightly elevated pacing. I'll run off the bike a couple of times, do some easy spins, and some shorter runs. The only thing I will not be tapering is my swim. I need one more week of long efforts for mental sanity sake. I missed my planned 3 mile swim to take care of some more important matters so I want to get that done and out of the way. I swim so darn slow and easy that it just doesn't take a big toll on me. So I'll do one 3 mile swim and one 2.4 mile swim this week and then cut my swimming to nothing until I get down to the race venue where I hope to get a practice swim on the course in. Or at least a partial swim. It sounds like there is a tricky turn in the swim and I want to preview that part especially.
Other treats and thoughts for next week are to start stretching again following the routine from my physical therapist. I always feel better when I do that so I'll take advantage of the reduced training time to stretch a bit more. I'll use the time spent stretching to work on my mental training as well. Its time to work on some more of those positve affirmations that are going to serve me well on race day. I also have a massage scheduled to work out some more kinks and do the best I can to get ready for race day.
I'll be crossing the finish line of my first Ironman in two weeks... seems kind of hard to imagine. Its been so far away for so long and suddenly its extremely close!
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As it turns out, the cardiologists told us they are seeing more and more young people in similar shoes Marlboro Cigarettes. Leading stressful lives, not exercising and eating poorly are all key factors that lead to serious health issues Marlboro Lights.
ReplyDeleteWorking in the health field, I see every day the effects that smoking can have on my patients. Despite all their health problems, they are still smoking.
Our family quickly turned from shock to prayer mode. Thanks to a very talented surgeon, my son began to recover quickly.