The Taper + Highlights of This Week in the Tropics
With just 13 days left until the marathon, I’m backing off the training quite a bit. But, I’m still drinking coffee and watching the ultra-fit Ironmen (and Ironwomen) tear up the roads on foot and bike, a combination that has me wanting to train more when I am absolutely certain I shouldn’t. So, with a fairly solid 6M pace run Thursday, my final long(ish) run of 15M on Friday and five 1M repeats today at a respectable pace, it is all short and/or easy efforts from here until race day.
This is, in many ways, the hard part. There’s the anticipation of the race, which can lead to doubts about my fitness, past training, and eventual performance. And my best stress buster – lots of exercise – is about the worst thing for me right now, at least as far as improving the odds of a good day on October 1st. What my body needs most is to rest up and repair from the nearly 4 months of daily self-inflicted fitness punishment. So, I’ll try to be a “regular American guy” a little bit leading up to the race, with feet up, relaxing on the couch. But, no alcohol, no deserts, no soda, nothing fried or breaded, and limited “white” foods (flour, rice, potatoes, sugar). And very little football. Actually, almost nothing like a “regular American guy,” I guess.
In non-running news, we’ve been getting in a good mix of daily island life, including sea kayaking and some hiking over lava and trips to some waterfalls and a farmer’s markets and local restaurants and the obligatory (highly contrived and for-tourists-only) luau. I even ate some kalua pig, which is weird times three for a Jewish vegetarian health nut.
Oh, and I got to do some small game hunting. Tired of holes being chomped through the exterior of all of our food products while we slept, I set up some rat traps, as much as a way to teach Sagan some physics as to catch anything. But, after just one night of some avocado-baited traps, we awoke to this scene on the kitchen counter:
It isn’t all as much fun as rat neck breaking, though. Yesterday about all we got to do is go to a place that had this:
Kind of Like Fun 