Not The Taper I Wanted

The one thing I can say is the last 15 weeks have gone quite well and relatively uninterrupted, until this past week. I was to have one final week of mileage and one last MP workout to finish out the "plan", then taper slowly for one week and race on Monday. With the continual right arch discomfort I've been having, and not really mentioned it too much in the past because it hasn't kept me from training, I decided to take a stand and really attempt to get that arch feeling better and try to increase my odds of a good race come April 15th.  What that meant though was a forced taper earlier than I would have liked but getting my foot feeling as good as possible was/is number one priority. I have had a decent training plan and now realize I am not going to get any fitter, and quite honestly I could risk further injury, so I made the decision to take every other day off this past week and aggressively treat my arch. It's working. I have run the last two days and felt pretty good. As long as things don't get too ugly on the course in Boston, I still feel like a new PR is possible.

I'm sure I will have a moment to write a few words this next week but just in case I don't I plan to run easy every day this next week except Saturday, which is a travel day. The legs felt good today and so it continues for a week. That feeling of bottled energy, anxiety, excitement, and often feelings of self-doubt. It is all too common to sit around and feel like you could have done so much more and that one workout should have been this pace, not that pace, but really, if you get to the starting line healthy you just increased your odds of having a good race. The last marathon I ran, including my Boston qualifier, I ran so much less than what I have done this winter and I ran very respectable. I hope to repeat that.

My number for the race is  #813. I'm in wave 1, corral 1. The elite women have a 25 minute head start and I will be lining up right behind the elite men for a starting time of 10:00 am EST. (that's 9:00 am in Duluth Hypo)

Here is the rest of the past week:

M: 0, therapy
T: 53:00 7 miles
W: 0 poor sleep, head cold persists, therapy/sleep
Th: 1:15:00  11 miles with 8 at 5:56 pace
F: 0 miles therapy
Sa: 36:00  5 miles easy *foot better
Su: 1:10:00  10 miles w/ 3 X 3 minutes at 5:52 as test

Total: 33 miles  *let the taper begin

Years Total: 836.4 miles