Tapering for Boston: The hay might not be in the barn.

It's that time again, the 119th annual Boston Marathon is going down in exactly 19 days whether I'm ready or not.  A year ago when I was preparing for my first Boston things were much different.  I spent the entire fall maintaining my fitness and ran a personal best 1:25 half marathon at Thunder Road in Charlotte in mid-December.  Then I rolled that into a very structured 16 week training plan that included a couple of 18 milers and three 20 mile runs.  The training plan this year has been neither structured nor planned for that matter.

I signed up for Boston back in September because frankly I don't know how many more times this opportunity will come back around.  For the next 4 months I was regularly back and forth between running and not running and justified both a hundred times.  Shortly after signing up for Boston I started training with some of the Hey Jack guys and committed to running the Richmond marathon in November.  I used a shortened version of the Hanson plan where I ran the same 6 day workouts but picked up halfway through the plan since I was already running fairly regularly.

The Hanson brothers and Richmond put the beat down on me so I ran very sparingly during the last two weeks of November and the first two weeks of December.  I finally got serious about treating my plantar fasciitis because it was starting to bother me in both feet.  I started to lean towards not running Boston and when I weighed the cost of the trip versus where I was mentally and physically eating the $175 registration fees was starting to seem like a pretty good deal!

Eventually I got back in the groove and put together a string of decent training runs.  Towards the end of January the Hey Jack guys were signing up for the Charlotte Running Company trail race so I decided to use that race to make my decision.  If I could get through a half marathon on some fairly challenging trails then surely with a solid 8 weeks to train and a 3 week taper I might able to salvage this Boston thing after all, right?     

Well I made it through the trail race in one piece but I felt like garbage afterwards.  Fortunately I didn't have any lingering effects so I decided to get serious with an 11 week plan starting on February 1st.  I finished the month of February by logging a whopping 147 miles (note sarcasm) which was basically 37 per week for any of you doing the math.  I managed to get a 15 and a 16 miler in there and a few solid tempo workouts but my travel and life schedule just weren't cooperating and I wasn't making the sacrifices I made last year to log more miles.

March rolled around and Hey Jack was firmly committed to running the Palmetto 200 with a short squad just one man removed from an ultra team.  Not having thought through this before I'm starting to notice a common theme as to why I seem to be in a constant state of fatigue.  It's seems to have something to do with these hair brained Hey Jack ideas.   Having run a fairly safe BQ for 2016 at Richmond and knowing I wasn't in position to run a P.R. this year I decided to make Palmetto the priority.  I began running 7-8 miles at marathon race pace twice a day in addition to the occasional tempo run and decided use the cumulative fatigue principal to morph my bastardized training plan into a quasi-Hanson plan.  Then I decided to throw in a 20 miler two weeks before Palmetto because I was afraid it might be my last opportunity to get one in for peace of mind.

I logged 50 miles per week during the first 3 weeks which included a 20 miler and the Palmetto weekend where I knocked out 36 miles between 2:20 PM on Friday and 10:20 AM on Saturday with runs of 8.6 mi @ 6:38 / 4.2 mi @ 6:43 / 9.8 mi @ 7:01 / 7.5 mi @ 7:18 / 6.6 mi @ 7:26 and no sleep in between.  Surely that had to help, right?? (and this is where one of you experienced runners needs to reply and say yes!)  I was actually starting to feel pretty good about myself but wasn't expecting the train wreck I was headed for...

The week after Palmetto I really didn't feel that bad.  I took a day off to sleep then a day to recover and  the next day I ran 6.  I felt good to start but a few miles in the monkeys with ice picks began digging into my legs.  I took the next day off and followed that up with an 8 mile run but again was struggling to maintain a decent pace so the miles went by slowly but obviously I was still recovering.  I took the next two days off which put me at 14 miles for the week in what should have been my last high volume week before a 3 week taper.

On the heels of the Palmetto 'recovery week' I decided to get one last long run in.  The goal was 16 and depending on how I felt possibly 18-20.  About 3 miles into a headwind I was leaning heavily towards the 16 miles and and at 6 miles I made it official.  I was not running one step past 16.  Not even on my radar.  And I was so sick of running what seemed like a constant uphill into a headwind that I decided to turn around at 8 miles no matter where I was and run it back.  Then I got the wild hair to try to run the final 8 miles at marathon race pace.  Well that was another disaster in waiting.  Physically and mentally.

Initially I banged out a few marathon pace miles then slogged up a few more hills.  Apparently the 8 miles to begin wasn't entirely uphill.  I was starting to wake the quad demons of the Palmetto (at least that's what I'm blaming it on) and my legs just weren't cooperating.  Eventually I reached the final 2 mile stretch home and decided to finish with whatever I had left.  Chalk up another bad idea for me.  But nonetheless, with a mile 16 at close to 10K pace I was feeling a slight moral victory albeit combined with a horrendous set of aching legs.

That pretty much gets me to where I am now.  I'm a dude that ran 14 miles last week, struggled to get through 16 miles on Monday, took Tuesday off, and ran 8 on Wednesday in less than stellar fashion.  And like any runner looking to get back on track - I went to buy some new running gear.  My plan going forward is to run a couple easy runs this week -- 5 today, 7 Thursday, and then try to get 12-14 miles in on Saturday.  That would put me near 50 this week but only because last weeks long run was on Sunday and this week my long(ish) run is on Saturday.

For all practical purposes I have about 12 days to run - the rest of this week and next.  I'm not counting the week leading up to Boston because I'll just be running to keep my legs moving that week.  I'm hoping (against hope) that having two marathons under my belt going into this year's race will somehow help me.  I'm hoping that the Palmetto mileage will have a benefit similar to a 20 miler run because I was certainly running on some beat down legs.  And I'm hoping that this old body heals in the next few weeks so that running at marathon pace feels relatively comfortable again because right now - it doesn't!

Please...... somebody tell me that a 14 mile week is perfectly acceptable 4 weeks out from a marathon and that not feeling comfortable running marathon race pace 2.5 weeks out is no biggie.  And I'm perfectly fine with being lied to....