I Love The Taper!

I had my last "long" training run last weekend and it went quite well I think. I had the help of Kimmi and Kris to keep my mind preoccupied and get me through the distance, so thank you very much ladies. I won't say which is which, but one of them ran the first 11 plus miles with me and then went home and partially died even though she's of Ironman caliber and I made the other one entertain me and talk more during the last hour and a half than she probably did the rest of the entire day. If I have a successful race I owe part of that to you two. Wanna come to Indy and do it 1 more time to get me through the race?! :)

Speaking of the race, tomorrow is the day I start to become neurotic about it. Tomorrow marks T -10 and anyone who's ever done any racing knows what that means, don't you? Yup, I get to start checking the weather forecasts multiple times throughout the day! Tomorrow it'll just be a couple of times, but by the time the day or two before the race comes around I'm usually looking at the updates hourly. I know it's so unproductive to do because I can't do anything about changing the weather, but hey, it's just part of the routine now. I'll be taking clothes for all scenarios anyway so why not just watch the weather the night before the race and leave it at that, right? That'd be too easy. I guess I want to know beforehand if the weather is going to be crappy so I can mentally prepare myself.

The Taper Period is weird. You train all season and always look forward to the 2 or 3 weeks before the marathon so you can rest up, but once it gets here you feel like you haven't done enough and want to get out there and do a couple of more training runs. At this point there isn't anything you can do to physically improve other than rest up, but that's the last thing you can make yourself believe. It's a matter of trusting what you did up to this point will help you succeed. So does that mean self-doubt is more prevalent than self-confidence? Ah, that's too deep for something that's just meant to be about running.

I better go find something else to do for the next 10 days.