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taper (and tapir) love

taper (and tapir) love

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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). 

low-hanging clouds on S. Rim after Friday’s storm

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.  

Signs

Signs

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Running is so weird. Last week I wrote about how I bailed on my cutback 16-mile LR because I just felt sub-meh, so instead of grinding through it, I ran for less than an hour before coming home and getting some additional rest. I felt like I was making the right decision, given the bodily feedback I had, but admittedly, it’s still hard sometimes when my head and heart are pulling me in different directions. 

Well, after that bailed long run, on Sunday I ran the longest and farthest of this training cycle, and it felt better than I hoped it would. I figured I’d run about 26-27, maybe around 5-6 hours, and that’s pretty much exactly how it ended up: 26.5, 5:39, and just under 5,000’ of climbing. My goal was less as fast as possible and more along the lines of time on feet and dial-in the fueling for race day. I’m pretty happy with how it went, overall, and how I felt. 

It was a weird beginning though, for sure, and something that I keep revisiting. I’ve found myself thinking about John a lot more recently, rest in peace. My guess is that it stems from last week’s Chicago Marathon because more often than not, he ran it (and Stacey would jump in for a bit), and we’d all text and email after the fact and celebrate the victories and bitch about the heartaches and/or the weather. 

In the off-chance that he didn’t run it, John always offered colorful commentary about his observations of the race after the fact, mutual friends whom he saw (or didn’t see, curiously), that sort of thing. These text or email exchanges were a given every second Sunday in October.

It was weird to have a Chicago Marathon weekend come and go and not hear from him. 

rest in peace. (Chicago, summer ’19)

Anyway. As it is for a lot of people, for me, sometimes the hardest part of any given run is the first couple miles or, before that, simply getting out the door in the first place. I didn’t start my long LR on Sunday until dawn, around 6:45, so I wouldn’t have to wear a headlamp unnecessarily for hours. In the first 20 or so minutes, I was cycling through periodic mental soliloquies, wondering why I was doing this in the first place, thinking of all the other things I could be doing at that moment, trying to remember why I thought doing a 50k again was a good idea … typical beginning-of-LR mental banter when I’m by myself.

And then: BOOM. Shortly after I began running, the most brilliantly colored sky stopped me in my tracks. By myself, in the pre-dawn Sunday morning, I involuntarily let out an audible ohmygod for no one to hear but me. The colors were so unusual and so unlike what I see at this time of year that seeing them where and when I did stopped me dead in my tracks. I didn’t stop to take a picture because I just wanted to experience it, myself, right then and there. 

I haven’t been running in the early mornings much anymore, save for the weekends, so maybe that affected my visceral response. Maybe the pre-dawn/blue hour skies are always that color at this time of year, and I just haven’t seen it lately to notice. The best I could remember, though, was that that type of sky — filled with those types of hues — is something that I usually don’t see until the early morning runs in the winter. (It’s part of the reason why winter running is always my fav season, even when I lived in Chicago). 

Left to my own devices — and responsible for getting myself through the next five-or-so hours of running and climbing — I decided that this brilliant sky was an auspicious beginning to this run, the same run for which not all that long ago I was feeling a bit of trepidation.

Hell, maybe this sunrise was even a sign from John that this run would be fine, that I got this. 

I realize that thinking that John was “sending” me a message from “the other side” sounds a bit crunchy, even for me, but I couldn’t shake the feeling. So fast, within the first 20 minutes of my run, before I began the hard-hard work, my emotions catapulted from trepidation/gritting-teeth realism to thinking that I got this, it’s fine, it’s nothing I haven’t done before. The transition was quick and breathtakingly dramatic. 

And then. Right as I was about to enter the park, after twenty minutes of chiding myself for thinking that John somehow sent me a brilliant, seemingly-rare sunrise, I noticed a sleek fox bolting out of someone’s yard and quickly trying to hide away in the woods.

It’s rare for me to see foxes at or near the park — in the almost-eight years I’ve been running there, I can probably count on one hand how many I’ve seen — and it got me thinking about John, again. Foxes no doubt are in the park and in the surrounding area, living right under our noses, but most of the time, we don’t see them; that’s how they survive, by flying under the radar more often than not.     

John was that type of friend to a lot of people. You always knew he was there, that he was around, but a lot of the time, he chose to fly under the radar. He never wanted attention on himself. The thought of anyone lavishing praise or attention on him for anything, no matter how noble or amazing or great his accomplishment was, would make him cringe. (This even came up in his funeral service). 

Maybe it’s weird to proclaim that an unseasonable, brilliantly-colored sunrise and then an elusive, almost-invisible fox in a twenty-minute timeframe, at the outset of a killer long run — one that I felt uneasy about from the get-go — made me think of my deceased friend and training partner, whom I miss dearly, but it did. 

For the next five hours and change, my thoughts kept returning to our friendship that spanned over a decade-plus. 

Even when the run got hard, or I got tired, or whatever, the momentary challenges were eclipsed by a sense of gratitude and calm, a feeling of genuine happiness to be out there and doing what I was doing. 

Not going to lie: it was amazing. It was a run that I’ll definitely bottle. 

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