Generally speaking, my relationship with the taper varies considerably (not to be confused with my relationship with tapirs, which remains positive. Sending love to my fellow herbivores, always).

Sometimes we read about runners or athletes having “taper tantrums” since they’re dealing with the challenge of working out less than they’re accustomed to, all in the interest of arriving on race day fresh, peaked, and ready to roll. 

When you’re used to working out X times a week and suddenly you are working out X-Y minutes/hours/miles instead, it can definitely feel a little disorienting. What are you going to do with all your new-found time?!?! 

For some people, this extra time that they’re not spending running or training gives them plenty of opportunities to fret and begin to second-guess everything they’ve done for the past who-knows-how-many weeks and months, which obviously isn’t advantageous leading into a race. 

At the other end of the spectrum, of course, is marching toward and entering Taperlandia almost triumphantly because sometimes just getting through training in one piece is cause for celebration — nevermind what actually transpires on race day. 

Athletes may feel like they’ve been teetering on the brink, that they’ve been straddling the line of injury or overtraining, until suddenly they can pull back the curtain, relax a little, and step back in intensity and/or duration to catch their breath (figuratively, literally, maybe both). 

For some, the taper can’t arrive soon enough, and they welcome it with very open arms (and very tired bodies).

I’ve been in both camps, as well as everywhere in between. For most of my marathons I’ve run, particularly before I had children, training was usually occurring within the confines of a lot of other stuff, particularly graduate school (x2), internships, full-time work, commuting, and the like. The weeks when everything was heavy felt particularly impossible, making me feel like I didn’t have a respite from anything… until suddenly, taper, voila, and the heavens parted and the angels sang and the renewal process began. It was glorious.

In the only other 50k I’ve ever done, it was much the same. No longer were my weekends full of back-to-back long runs; suddenly, sleep became more of a thing than it was before, as was time to do non-running-related pursuits. I guess I didn’t realize how much time, relatively speaking, I was spending on running until I began to intentionally run less.

More recently, time and experience (and life circumstances being what they are with being married, having two young kids in school, and that sort of thing) has taught me to embrace the taper and not sweat the details too much. I think it matters less what you haven’t done and more of what you have done, within reason. Time is a finite resource for all of us, and we do the best we can with the resources and time we have available (and, when needed, we adjust our goals accordingly relative to our training).

Sweating what we haven’t done is a waste of precious time and mental real estate.

Focus on what you have (or in this case, what you’ve done), not on what you haven’t, ya know?

It’s the same refrain I echo to my kids on the regular. 

In the event that I feel a bit more “springier” than normal, I try to harness whatever nerves I have and redirect them to more fruitful endeavors, such as accomplishing the non-running stuff that has taken a back burner or, ideally, getting more sleep or rest than I usually can. 

This comes with varying levels of success as I evaluate my priorities. In this regard, in the past month, I’m happy to say that I’ve been getting more sleep than usual (to the detriment of my morning daily ritual with the NYT). I can assure you, however, that my clean laundry is still scattered in piles throughout my house because I have “no time” to put it away. Again: priorities.  

After last week’s cutback 16 mile LR (“cutback” = 16 miles, you know you’re in endurance training mode when…), that I completely and utterly lollygagged because I felt tired AF, the weekend’s running was pretty limited due to an all-weekend-long swim meet (which I knew was coming and for which I planned accordingly). 

I was able to get in an easy ~50 minutes on Saturday after the meet, but on Sunday, I couldn’t Life Tetris my schedule to make a comparably-meaningful run happen unless I: 

a) woke up at 4am to run at 5am  — which I tried to do, and failed — to be home by 6am to wake-up the kids and get them ready, or 

b) ran through a rain deluge (that had been raging since 7am) at around 8pm at night. 

I cut my losses and ran for an easy mile, like 10’ or so, around 8pm just to keep the streak alive and to play in the glorious and much-needed rain for a few. It was enough.

When I finished, I all but declared that taper, I’m looking forward to your embrace. 

It harkens back to the this whole idea about “the totality”; I could sweat the ~4 miles that I didn’t run last week that put me just shy of my mileage goal for the week, or I could just take comfort in the fact that my extra sleep Sunday morning was probably more meaningful — and probably better for my fitness adaptations — than running an extra forty minutes that day (and especially after being at a meet all day, all weekend, and everything else that I had going on Sunday). 

The 50k is coming up here fast, so this week is a little mini-taper before a 35k on Saturday morning, the last long-LR before the big day. I’m going into the weekend’s race with a clean slate and rockin’ attitude because there’s literally no basis of comparison here for me. I’ve never run a 35k race, and in fact, I’ve only ever done a couple other trail races before (and not at this specific distance and not at the location where I’ll be going). I’ve run 35k in marathon training runs and in marathons, of course, but never really as its own, stand-alone thing and most definitely not in a trail racing environment. 

It’s actually pretty rad to be going into a race with no real expectations or hopes or goals beyond finishing.

I’m feeling pretty stoked and jazzed and am looking forward to a few more days of low-key running between now and then.