tapering

I just got a text from one of our marathoners: "Is it weird/bad that I cannot force myself to run this week?"

Mmm... no. Right about now, you're feeling the effects of running fewer miles. You're aware that the race is now not a matter of weeks away, but just one week. You may want to run more, you may feel weirdly unmotivated. people react a bit differently, but it's all the "taper madness".

What do you do? Run the long run tomorrow - it's just seven miles, it'll be over before you know it. It'll be flat, it'll be the last long run of this season with your friends. Enjoy it.

Next week, your runs are short and easy. Decide to get them out of the way. Yesterday, I parked at Doc's for my work happy hour, got out, and ran the first 10K of the course before joining my coworkers. Make each run a recon mission - run a part of the course. Visualize, think about what you'll need to be doing there, think about what it'll be like. Visualize the final miles, the specatators, the finish.

Over this next week, think about why you decided to do this in the first place. Think about how your motivations may have changed as you got deeper into training. Think about the doubts you had, the moments where you thought of giving up. Think about all the support you've had, all the miles you've run, all the times you've said "no" on a Friday night to going out, or another drink, or a heavy meal.

Our lives will go on this next week. But you have worked for six months for this race. You've earned the right to focus on it, to take refuge in it from everything else, at the very least, when you step up to the line on Sunday morning.

I will commit to posting something on here daily over the next week, much of it old stuff that a few of you might have seen on my personal blog. I do this to share, and yeah, because I'm a self-aggrandizing writer, but also because I want you to think about this whole experience.

The following is from October 17, 2006, just five days before the Chicago Marathon (yeah, we ran six days a week - it was an intermediate program):


tapering (five days to go)

emails are flying between my friends and me. no work is getting done. emotions are high. we want to be in chicago right damned now, regardless of the weather (though we update each other on the forecast twice a day). we want to be running it now.

marathoners call it "taper madness" - the wackiness that ensues during the two or three week period before a marathon when we back off the mileage and let our bodies repair and become ready. i ask melissa, a psychologist, if there's a biochemical basis for the weird psychosis. hours pass, i get more emails reminiscing about our favorite coaches, about weather, and finally, "sure. but you are asking me to think in order to formulate an intelligent answer to that. and, i just can't do that right now."

so, i'm left to my own devices. i eat a banana, and stare at the whopping third document i've reviewed today. a normal pace would have me at 60 or so. why are we all losing our minds?

simply put, running is a natural ability, but training for and running a marathon is not a natural thing to do.

we train for 23 weeks. close to a thousand miles run - 30, 40, 50, 60 miles a week. we run four or five days a week. an hour monday, an hour tuesday, a hard workout for an hour and a half on wednesday, cross training or a half hour run on thursday, over an hour on friday, long runs for hours on saturdays.

those hours are squeezed into mornings before work, appended to the end of workdays when you feel like you only have the energy to open a beer and keep the couch from floating away.

people that choose and stick with this path are not likely to say, "I can't," and the training reinforces that. on the other hand, we say it more now than ever - "I can't, gotta run." "I can't, I have a race."

we push ourselves six days a week, for 23 weeks. exertion and fatigue become constants, as does the simple act of consistently, persistently committing ourselves to creating discomfort in our bodies and pressing on anyway.

"The will to win means nothing if you haven't the will to prepare." - Juma Ikangaa, 1989 NYC Marathon winner

it's a compulsion, and if it didn't start as one, it became one along the way. every run says something about us, who we are and what we can do - not about our speed but about our will. sometimes, we're disappointed by how slow we were on a run or in a race, because we're competitive and because sometimes we lose sight of the fact that the time doesn't matter so much as how hard we pushed ourselves to get it.

one day, during a particularly hard workout on a high school
track, a kid leaned out a passing car's window, yelling some line i recognized from a movie about the day of judgment being on us, and asking, "how will ye be judged?"

the immediate response yelled back as i turned down onto the stratghtaway - "by what i do here today."

we watch the chicago marathon highlight video, and the sight of the runners and the cheering crowds shakes us. to some extent, it's adrenaline - fight or flight response positively subverted, adrenaline charges as we recognize the scenario. but we can't do anything with it right now, sitting at our desks, or at home.

we want the race, the pre-run jitters, we want to be surrounded by 40,000 other people who have made the same journey thus far, the same hegira from doubt and unchallenged limitations.

we don't know each other, we might not even like each other if we did, but almost everyone out there "gets it," and we are finishing a journey together, whether it takes us 2:10 or 6:10 to do it.

the thousands of spectators lining the course watch people go by, see the determination and pain, and to some extent, they "get it." some of them will be motivated, as i was two years ago, to make that same commitment, to see what they can make themselves do.

i think again of our head coach, steve sisson, saying that whether it's the first time you cross the finish line, or the 50th, you are not the same person that started it.

the clock, the calendar, are running too slow. my friends and i want and need sunday to get here, so we can do what we have worked so hard to do, as best as we can on that given day. we want to run, so we can cross the finish line and see who we will have become.