The taper begins-the hay is in the barn

Good morning or afternoon . . . depends on when you read this. It is Monday morning while I'm writing. Two weeks from today I will know whether all the training I've been doing since November will pay off.

I need to catch you up . . . .

Last Thursday, I did Yasso 800s. My last hard speedwork session. Pretty scary. If Yassos may be used as a predictor of you marathon time as many articles have said, then perhaps I'm better than I thought. I ran all my Yassos in the 3:20 to 3:30 range. Does that truly mean that I have the potential for a 3:30 marathon???? Afterall, I have been doing almost all my long runs well under my anticipated marathon pace of 9:09. In fact, I've been doing most of my long runs in the 8:40-8:45 range. I have deliberately ran some slower ones just to get the feel of the pace but perhaps I could run 8:45s for the whole marathon. That would put me around a 3:49 marathon.

Saturday I did a 21 miler. The last long run for this training cycle (thank goodness). I'm not going to say it was routine but you know you're making progress when you can finish your run, work in the yard all day and go to a party that night until after midnight and have no ill effects from it. I really did nothing special the night before in preparation for the run. No carb loading, no long stretch of sleep the night before. In that aspect of it, I think that I'm as ready as I can be. My neighbor Chip ran with me, though he just did 15 miles (he's doing a 3 week taper for the same marathon I'm doing). It is always nice to have someone to run with, even if all you're doing is just breathing, snorting, and spitting together! I ran it in 3:06 and change. Close enough to call it 3:06. That works out to 8:51.5 pace. A little slower than previous weeks but we did throw in some slower miles in the middle. All I can do now is hurt myself more than help myself. As I said in my title: the hay is in the barn. I've got to trust my training.

On Sunday morning before church, Susan and I ran somewhere between 5 1/2 and 6 miles. An interesting thought . . . . should I call this two separate training sessions or can I say that it was the slowest marathon I ever ran (approx. 23 hours)???? I think I like the sound of two training sessions better. This was an easy recovery run for me but a good training run for Susan. This is the first time that she has been able to do a negative split . . . hooray for her. Going out was 30:33 and coming back was 30:07. Total 60:40. If it was 5 1/2 miles then we did 11:02 miles. If it was closer to 6 miles then we did 10:07 miles. I think we were probably somewhere in between. I think that she'll be ready for her 10k in a couple of weeks.