Taper Gladness and Race Goals

I've heard a lot about this thing they call "taper madness." People cut down their running and they start to get antsy, go stir-crazy, get phantom pains--stuff like that. I'll admit, for my first marathon I maybe had a touch of that nonsense. For this marathon--nope. Instead of taper-madness I've got taper gladness. This training cycle has been so busy that cutting back has been a relief. This week I'm not looking at my schedule and figuring out where in the heck all my runs are going to fit in. It's nice.

I did feel a little off last week on days 4 and 5 of my two week taper. I don't know how much of that was my hips truly being sore and how much of that was just a little phantom taper pain. Now though, I'm loving it. This week, six miles will be my longest run before the marathon on Saturday. SportTracks told me I've ran between 6 1/2 and 8 hours a week for the past two months. That's almost an entire day of my week spent running. I love running, but after 20+ weeks of fairly focused training, it's nice to have a little extra time to do other things.

Lake Wobegon Trail Marathon Goals

I've decided I'm going to go for broke on this marathon and shoot for a sub-3 hour marathon. I've put in hard training, I'm fairly healthy, and my 20k time suggests I can do it, so I might as well go for it.

My race plan is to run the first 3-5 miles at a conservative pace or around 6:55-7 min/mile. Around the 10k mark I'll try to pick it up to 6:50 miles and at the halfway point see how I feel. At that point I'll stick with the pace, pick it up a hair, or back off a little bit.

The weather's supposed to be pretty cool--the weatherman's saying 40ish degrees at the start and it doesn't look like it's supposed to get much warmer than 40 the whole race. That's maybe a little cool, but not so cool as it should have a big effect on the race. I'd rather it be a hair cooler than ideal than too warm.

I'm excited and I'm hoping it's going to be a good one.