Tales of the Taper

I’m running my first marathon in eight days! I had my last training session before the marathon with Joel this morning, and I’m feeling that much more ready. He told me I was looking really strong and that he thought I’d definitely be able to hit my goal time. We did a lot of Pilates-type strength exercises so that I didn’t fatigue my muscles any further. My run tomorrow, my last long run before the race (!), is supposed to be a dry run for the marathon. I felt good at the half-marathon last weekend, so I’m trying to eat pretty closely today to what I had the day before.

Which just happened to be a bagel for breakfast. Oh damn! 🙂

After working out with Joel for an hour, I still had to run three miles. After training runs that lasted for hours, I was psyched to hit the trail for a half hour! I went out so happy I was nearly giddy.

My Garmin was being iffy picking up a signal, which actually worked for the better. I wanted to run at an easy pace, so I just looked at the time until it said a half hour. You can tell it’s training time for the NYC Marathon because you couldn’t swing a cat without hitting a training group on the West Side Highway path this morning.

I smiled at my fellow runners crazy people as I plodded past them, only slightly wistful for my own long runs. After weeks of trying to run faster than I’d ever run or longer than I’d ever run, it did feel sort of weird to only run a slow three miles. (Good weird.)

I’ve been reading as many marathon recaps as I can get my hands on, and next week, I’m going to put together a huge post with people’s marathon recaps (both for myself and for you!), so if you’ve run a marathon and wrote a recap or read an awesome marathon recap, can you comment/reply with a link?