Posts Tagged ‘taper’

Thanks to fellow blogger Joe who kindly alerted me to a thread on LetsRun, it appears that the finish for the Philadelphia marathon is going to be an honest to goodness clusterfuck.  Here’s the image the original poster supplied.
Green – half marathon,  Red – marathon at half way,  Blue – marathon finish

As you can see, it appears that the marathon finishers will be forced to actually cross through the slower marathoners reaching their halfway point!  I can’t. believe. this.  But then, it’s Philly, so yes I can.

I’m hanging in there, though not without a quadruple dose of taper angst.  My run today was 7 w/2x(10min@HP, 2min rec) and my HR was just too damned high at 90 and 92% max on the Half pace portions.  I’m hoping it’s just overall anxiety, which I truly have in excess now, but it’s really putting a fear into me that I wish I didn’t have.

The rest of the week is 6 tomorrow, rest day, 5 and 4, then race.  The weather looks good at this point, so that’s a wonderful bonus.

Beyond my worried mood, I am so excited for this weekend because I’m finally going to meet several of the ladies I’ve been “talking to” for over a year in the Women’s BQ thread.  A bunch of gals are coming in for the race, both the Full and Half, as well as cheering section, and to actually meet these gals in the flesh (we know so much about each other by now) is going to be incredible.

Plus, Audra and Kat (I ran Steamtown with Audra and the Lehigh Half with Kat) are going to be staying with me, not racing but will be cheer support so I’ll have my own personal pit crew the night before.  Pre-race pillow fights!! Woohoo!!  So there’s a lot to be excited about, if I can just take my mind off my stupid heart for a while.

Thanks everyone for such cool comments to my little mishap on Sunday.  You guys and gals are stupendously great.  One good thing I got out of that run was that it was my gel dress rehearsal because my most favorite shorts only have a key pocket (Race Ready shorts are dumpy on me, so no one even suggest that, please).

My original plan was to do the pinning thing (for the uninformed, you pin the gels to the outer waistband of your shorts then tuck them inside your shorts so they don’t bounce, then you rip them off when you need one)  but because I’ll have a bottle in one hand, that makes ripping the gels off too difficult.  Then I remembered I had that detachable pocket I bought for Steamtown and didn’t end up using.  It works a treat!! Weighs an ounce, you can put it where you want and it’s very easy to take a gel out while on the run.  I put 3 in there and 2 in my handheld and didn’t even notice it was there.  Though maybe that’s because I was in pain from my weeping open wound.

Anyway, that’s one less thing on my mind.  Now if I could only unload the other 2 tons of mental garbage…