Journey to Kona Day 218: Threading the Tapering Needle

Taper time is coming soon.  I can feel it.  I nearly felt it a week ago, but managed to pull myself up off the floor and put in a solid week of training.  Today was a "rest" day.  No training, but essentially a twelve hour workday, consisting primarily of driving and flying.  I felt tired by the end of the day.  Not nearly as tired as I did a week ago, but the same type of tired.  Soon it will be time to officially start my taper.  To some degree, the transition is already beginning.  On Friday, I'll ride my bike for six hours, if all goes well.  However, I won't do any climbing.  I'll keep the ride mellow and just put in the volume and the time in the aero position.  Similarly, on Sunday, I plan to run twenty miles if all feels right. Again, no climbing, and I have permission to cut the run short depending upon how I feel.

As of Sunday, I'll have four weeks to go before Kona.  An ironman taper generally start at three weeks, but you have to pay attention to how you're feeling at four weeks in order to be able to effectively taper starting at three. Tapering is part science, part art, and part voodoo. Unfortunately, what works one time, may not (and probably won't) work the same way the next time. On a positive note, the week of rest I just took left me with the energy to pound out some incredible workouts over the past week. Still, I was carrying some fatigue.  If I can combine that type of response to the rest with truly reduced fatigue, I'll not only have the endurance for an ironman swim, bike and run, but I'll have the speed and power to produce my best results.

I've had the goal of not only experiencing Kona, giving it 100%, but having my best possible performance.  That would be cool!  No result will be disappointing to me, however, so long as I leave it all out there on the course. I remember doing the Boulder half ironman in 2009, having "tapered" by spending the week not training at all, barely getting 3 hours of sleep every night in the week leading up to the race, and having the maximal amount of stress due to the fact that we were filming a t.v. pilot (http://wassdoc.blogspot.com/2009/08/little-blossom-ironman-or-how-not-to.html).

So, with the help of my coach, I will thread the tapering needle and we'll see what happens in Kona!