Ready to taper

I've had a busy week at work, so no blogging. But I did get in my scheduled runs, except for one.

For whatever reason, many of the runs on my training schedule lately have been 5 milers. It's kind of left me running the same course over and over. Looking up at the maps, you can see they're almost all identical. In fact, tonight was 6 miles, but the map would have looked almost the same, if Akiva didn't make me go a different direction after the bridge.

Even though the course has been pretty much the same, my strategy has been different for these runs. (I feel so advanced when I think about that. Once upon a time, the only thing I thought about was how far to run, not really how to run.) The first run was a recovery run, and I ran the miles easy. The second run was meant to be at race pace. It was supposed to be a 3 miler, but since I had missed the earlier run in the week (speedwork), and I was planning to run less this weekend, I turned it into 5 miles. My plan was to run the first and last mile easy, and run the middle 3 at race pace. I didn't really pay attention to my Garmin too much, and it turned out that I ran those middle miles pretty fast. Surprising. Tonight was my weekend long run. Tomorrow it's supposed to rain, and tonight the weather was perfect. It wasn't too tough to fit in an hour of running to get my "long" run in. I tried to run them slow, but like usual I sped up a little in the end. I think I just want to finish and so I usually speed up towards the end.

So now, I'm really in taper mode. I have a few short runs set for this week, and then the half marathon next Sunday. I don't have high expectations, but I'm looking forward to it nonetheless. I think it will be good to race after resting my legs over this coming week.

In other news, some of my friends have signed up for the NYC triathlon. Not that I can really swim or cycle, I'd thought about signing up. I remember last year it sold out in May, for the July race. So I figured I'd see how things were going around February or so, and sign up then. Bad strategy. It's already sold out. It took about a week, and the event is 8 months away!

I suppose I can go elsewhere, but I was counting on the current in the Hudson. To go somewhere else would mean I'd really have to learn to swim better. That's kind of pain, especially with the whole beeper thing. I answer a lot of pages while I'm running. It seems much more difficult to do that while swimming.

I'll think about all this more when I'm resting after the race next week.