The Taper

On Saturday I did my second (of 2) 20-mile marathon training runs. Much like the first one a couple weeks ago, it was cold and sleeting and I hadn’t eaten a proper dinner the night before. This time it was considerably more icy though. Most of the sidewalks in the neighborhoods were covered by a thin film of ice still leftover from Thursday night. I did about 8 miles of the run on a 2-mile loop in the park near our house because the sidewalks there had mostly been cleared off. For the rest of it, I mainly stuck around areas of campus where the sidewalks were good and salted. But still. Being gingerly about randomly appearing slicks of ice slowed me down a lot. Not to mention the wind and freezing rain. In fact, it took me about 45 minutes longer to finish the run than it should have. The extra time certainly wasn’t helping my suddenly insatiable hunger that emerged at mile 2.8. Yikes, there was still a long way to go at that point. By sheer force of will, I waited to slurp my “Hammer Gel” until mile 7, and that sustained me until about mile 10. Then I swung by our house again, where I had stashed about 20 oz of Gatorade and some dried mangos on the front porch. I don’t know what it is about them, but dried mangos really do the trick for me on these long runs. I gulped my whole bottle of Gatorade (something I never do) and wolfed down 3 big pieces of dried mango.

Once I got to mile 12, I began the Countdown to the Taper. When training for a marathon, you build up your mileage over several months, and after a peak mileage week about 3 weeks before the marathon, you begin to taper it down. After months of practically running yourself into oblivion, during the taper you just concentrate on not getting injured or sick and on eating whole wheat pasta. Your training is essentially over—you’ve done all you can. Prior to this icy 20-mile run, I had actually not been looking forward to the taper. The reason being is that I love running, and during the taper, you do a lot less of it. All of a sudden it could not come soon enough. With every footfall, I was saying to myself (okay, and sometimes out loud too), “8 miles until the taper…” then “7 miles until the taper…” and so on. Finally I staggered in home—covered in frost and ice (ice had actually collected in my eyelashes)—but nearly euphoric to have actually survived to the taper.

I was exhausted but managed to keep going in the afternoon. We were out of everything that sounded good to eat, so I went to the grocery store, and then in the evening we went to Unkie John’s Firehouse Spaghetti Supper. Afterwards, everybody came back to our place to watch a movie. About 5 minutes into it, I passed out on the couch. For a while Rob kept trying to wake me up, but eventually I crawled back to our room and fell asleep with my clothes on and didn’t even hear everybody leave when the movie got over.

After running 20 miles in sleet and freezing rain, you feel awful pretty much everywhere—not just your legs and feet. Your arms and shoulders hurt. Your lungs hurt. Your head feels like a boiling tea kettle. You eat so much that your jaws hurt from chewing but you are still hungry. On Sunday, Rob and I both woke up with sore throats and stuffy noses. If it was just me feeling sick, I would blame it on the run, but Rob felt the same, so it must be something else. I’ve been taking Airborne, but I don’t think that stuff actually does anything. I think I need a rest, but this has suddenly become crunch time for absolutely everything in my life. That’s probably one of the reasons why I run—to ignore all the other things that I really should be doing. Now that I’m on the taper, I can suddenly see how much everything has piled up!

On that note, I need to get going. Here are a few pictures of the ice storm and some older ones of our Christmas tree:

Pulling in home from the Christmas tree lot: it looks like our car Iris is puking up a Christmas tree.

The tree un-decked.
("A lot of sap in here. A little full. Lot of sap." -- Chevy Chase in Christmas Vacation)

The tree, decked (view from outside):

Blurry ice at night