goodies for race day

Arizona travel day is one week away and taper time is now upon the Finanger household. This is the time when the volume of workouts starts to drastically decrease and your appetite remains on high alert. Tapering is like an annual, or semi-annual, ritual for endurance athletes and thank god for that. Because tapering sucks. I have never felt good during a taper, am constantly restless, and want to devour everything in sight. The only problem is, I'm not training with the same volume as usual throughout the season so I'm not burning the same amount of calories. This means unless one remains diligent about their nutritional intake, they can put on some extra pounds during this time.

The other problem is experimenting with your body to get the timing of a taper down right. Tapering for a 50 or 100 meter swim race is vastly different than tapering for an Olympic Distance triathlon which is vastly different than tapering for an Ironman. I've tried three week, two week, and ten day tapers in the past and the magic number for Arizona this year will be nine days. Honestly, there is not much rhyme or reason for why I decided on this, merely that I've wanted to keep my running miles higher than usual so I can tackle my main goal next weekend which is to finish my day with a 3:20 marathon or better. Might sound easy to most, but the best I've gone so far has been 3:30 at Kona in 2006.

I've incorporated a few cheating devises to help reign in my usual plan of a blitzkrieg bike split in order to help save my legs for the final leg -- a Cyclops PowerTap. I opted to build this nifty power measuring devise into a Zipp 808 rear wheel....but behold, another secret weapon, a disc wheel cover from the famous cycling engineer, Richard Sawaris of Wheelbuilder.com, will fit over the 808 rim and power meter to employ the advantages of a disc wheel on the possibly windy AZ course. My final secret weapon is the skull & crossbones of the Avia tri kit that good friend Julie V sent my way for race day. I opted to wear a time-trial skin suit during the cycling portion of IM Canada in August but paid for this decision by retaining a lot of heat on a warm day. The only way I'd go that route again is if Torbjorn Sindballe let me borrow his all-white Craft kit but that would be kind of gross.

Enough rambling...see, another side effect from tapering....the mind just races and has nothing better to do but think stupid thoughts.

Best of luck to everyone else training out there (yup, talking to you MarkyV) and suffering through a taper too.

LF