Thursday, June 28, 2012

Time to Taper


6am Start in Dayton
L-R: Christie, my older brother Dave, and Me

Ten days left between now and when we will be running the Missoula Marathon.  We are now right in the middle of our tapering period.  The tapering period begins about three weeks out from the Marathon, and is marked by the last and most significant long training run.  In our case this was a 22 mile run from Dayton to Troy Ohio along the banks of the Miami river.  Completing this long run is like graduating from  training for the race.  This was the fourth 20+ mile run in our training over a stretch of six weeks.  Average weekly mileage over those six weeks was 48 miles/week, with a peak of 56 miles/week.  This exceeds our weekly training mileage for the Surf City marathon by about 20%.  We are feeling strong and ready to set some new PRs in Montana on the 8th.
Dayton to Troy, 22 miles

Now we just have to let our bodies recover from those high mileage weeks, and be sure that we are eating nutritional food and resting.  Mileage is reduced to 25-35 miles per week for this week and next.  This gives us extra time and anxiety to think about what is coming and look back on what we have accomplished.  By the end of next week, we will have run over 700 miles training for this marathon, and logged miles in four different states.  Countless seconds, minutes, and hours with one goal in mind.  You would think during that time we would have figured out quite a bit about everything, but many questions remain:
  • How should I pace?
  • What should I eat?
  • What should I drink?
  • How much should I drink?
  • What should I wear?
  • What will the weather be like?
  • What will the course be like?
  • What if I go out too fast?
  • What if I'm sick?
  • What is plan A, B, and C?
I guess my philosophy is to take care of what you can take care of, and count on your training to take care of everything else.  If there is one consolation it is that there will be 1000 other people there with us, and family and others along the course cheering us on.  Something that doesn't exist during training.

Sadly, I'm not looking forward to it being over.  The marathon has the ability to compress time, and it will be over before we know it.  I'm hoping that I will be able to look back on it with the family members that are running it with me and be proud of what we have accomplished together, not just in those few hours, but over the years of training that brought us here.