After my great long run on Sunday, I was feeling pretty stellar. It's a great feeling to have your best long run come at the end of training. I definitely feel ready and feel like I've done all of the hard work. With a little more than two weeks to go until M-Day, I can say that I am finally on the down slope and can relax a bit.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. I said "relax" a bit - I didn't say ease up on training or slack off.
On that note, my training schedule looks like this for the remainder of the week:
I gave myself a vacation day on Monday so that SJ and I could head out to the North Fork and enjoy a perfect fall day together. SJ sampled some wines from the region and we had a nice easy stroll through Greenport. I figured I had earned it after putting in a solid week.
My department meeting went till forever on Monday night and waking up for work Tuesday morning was not the greatest. I had an 8 miler planned and it was a ridiculously gorgeous day out - unfortunately, I got stuck at work until later than I expected so I missed most of it. However, I still managed to squeezed my run in during the last remaining daylight hours. I did a little figure eight loop of Huntington at a reasonably quick clip. I've been trying to run my shorter distances lately with a strong second half because I've wanted to get myself used to picking up the pace even on tired legs. And while 8 miles isn't anywhere near as long as 26, if I can finish strong with each run leading up to the final week of tapering, then I feel like I'll be in a better place mentally.
Tomorrow I have my last set of hills before the marathon. Even though I should be doing hills in the week leading up to race day, I've opted to change it to an easier track work out instead (800s/400s). I've intentionally found a longish hill that has a slightly higher gradient than the Queensborough Bridge so that I can simulate to the best of my abilities what doing the climb will be like. I've run over the bridge more than enough times to know how it feels, but it'll feel a lot different after I've got 15 miles in my legs.
Today I managed to drag my butt back into the pool (hooray). It was still painful and I still wasn't going hard or even doing anything at a pace that could honestly be called a "workout", but it felt good to get back in the water and give my legs a rest, especially now that we're getting closer to race day (18 sleeps away - yikes).
I have never actually put myself through a taper before, so this is somewhat of a new thing for me. In the past, my taper has usually been something along the lines of - run today, then take off, maybe swim and bike, then take off another day, run two days in a row, have an easy bike, race day. Not the most conventional of tapering plans, nor were they laid out in any kind of actual order. It was really just as haphazard as my training plans have always been. However, with this whole marathon thing going down, I figured this summer I better buckle down and actually come up with some kind of "master plan". After I run Philly (yes, I'm still signed up to the run the Philly Marathon - two weeks after New York. Like this article says, triathletes are masochists.), I am going to sit down and look back at my training for the summer and see how well it went compared to previous years. I know you all are dying to know how that expose will turn out, but anyway, more on that when I have the time and my legs (and liver, cause lord knows I'm gonna drink like a sailor on leave those first couple weeks after the season is over) have recovered. So stay tuned.
But until then, keep checking back for more fun things in the land of training and
No comments:
Post a Comment