Another week of 90+ miles…excitement is building! :)Well, my final week of high mileage is complete and now my taper starts! Woo hoo! I cannot believe the race will be over in two weeks and I will be landing in Phoenix en route to Playa del Carmen! This past week I hit about 94.4 miles, to be exact, haha, and I felt great all week, except my runs on Saturday. I hit a mini wall and my entire body felt very fatigued on both of my runs. Rather than try to push through the fatigue in my muscles I allowed myself to simply run and go by feel. Yesterday I felt better and today was much better! I decided to sleep in yesterday and got 10 hours of sleep. I coupled that with ice baths and limited strength training and now I am ready to conquer my last intense workout tomorrow morning. I really feel that I needed to give my body a great night of rest rather than force myself to get up early like I do every day. Not only did my body feel better, my mind was in a more positive and refreshed mood.
GU Energy recently came out with two new flavors and they are delicious!! The Vanilla Gingerbread tastes exactly like a gingerbread cookie. Fabulous! The Pineapple Roctane flavor is also fantastic and tastes like a piece of fresh cut pineapple (well as close as you can get, ha). I LOVE GU gels and this time I will definitely NOT forget mine for my workout tomorrow morning!
Tapering has its benefits and its difficulties. It’s great to not be so tired every day and your body recovers and gets ready to perform at its best. However with the extra time on my hands I tend to think I am not busy enough. This time I will be sure to REST and not be super busy. If I am debating taking a nap I am going to force myself to take one, without an alarm! We all know pre-race night can be hit or miss on whether we can have a good night of sleep. Therefore getting a lot of it for a couple weeks prior will at least help my body somewhat!
I coached myself leading up to every single marathon I have ever done, except this one obviously. Having Brad’s expertise on keeping intensity and harder workouts in my training leading up to the race definitely helps. I think in the past I didn’t do enough longer and harder workouts somewhat close to the race, and my taper was too long and too few miles. We’ll see how this all turns out, but my body feels great and I can only imagine how fabulously fresh it will feel after two weeks of decreasing my mileage and intensity
Well I better relax for a little while before bed and my last really challenging workout tomorrow! yay!! I’ll take these awesome dance moves from the Dancing with the Stars tv show to the discos in Mexico in a couple weeks! woo hoo!
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