trying to taper

at the moment i am in the second week of my taper. what's that? well, apparently it is a really good idea to start running less and less in the three weeks before a marathon. i have followed some advice from the 'runner's world' website which has lots of good articles about training and so on.

my biggest mileage week was just under 50 miles. so last week i dropped it down to about 40 miles. more important than distance covered was the fact that i tried to run a little slower than normal. i had one run of about 6 miles at my marathon race pace, but all the others were about one and a half to two minutes per mile slower. well, that was the idea. but it is not that easy to run slower after running at the same pace for the past couple of months! my watch was very useful in telling me if i was going too fast, but i prefer to trust my body and how i feel. recently i have been feeling really good and often find at the end of a run that i ran a little faster than my plan. so i have tried taking more days off and that seems to help too. this week i will probably only run four times and will total no more than 30 miles. i will try to keep all my runs nice and slow, perhaps with a couple of miles at race pace in one run.

what's the point of a taper? well, i will be trying to run over 26 miles at a decent pace. so the main point is to let my muscles recover from training and to keep my body and all its systems at 100%. there is no point training hard now as it is unlikely to take any time off my marathon. instead it would probably make me more tired. i have to trust in the training i have done and in my mental strength to help me run through the hard parts of the marathon! and of course i know that rie will be there to cheer me on when i want to die!

am really looking forward to the anjo marathon now. have done some research and found out that it is run on a cycle path, but that they do not close the path. so there will be some walkers and cyclists and i might also have to pause for some red lights. might sound strange, but i think it will be a nice low-key introduction to the marathon for me!