Taper Madness

My training plan for next weekend’s triathlon has me on a two week taper.  I’m taking it to a bit of an extreme with no swimming or biking this weekend because I will be out of town, but I hope to fit in a quick run.

Taper time always leads to a bit of craziness.  There’s a reason they call it Taper Madness.  You’re spent so much time building up to long workouts, and then you step back before the race.  But it’s not race day yet!  I need to train more!

But the important thing right now is to rest my body and make sure that I’m not worn out before race morning.  The last thing I want to do is get there and find that my legs are suddenly made of concrete.

That doesn’t mean that I plan to sit on the couch until race morning, of course.  It means that my workouts get progressively more scaled back.  For example, Wednesday’s brick was 15 minutes shorter than last week’s.  Next week, I won’t have a brick – just an easy bike ride to keep my legs loose.

Unfortunately for me, this also means that I have to scale back my eating.  Last week was probably the hardest workout week for me, and it was kind of awesome.  I feel like I ate a ton and I still lost weight.  Can’t do that this week.  (Yes, I admit it, I workout so I can eat.)
I really love food.

Since I will be spending less time working out, maybe I should use this next week to get the house back into shape.  I don’t know how people train for an Ironman, work a full time job, and still keep up with their household tasks.  Maybe those people require less sleep than I do.

Let’s be honest.  I will make big plans for what I will do with all my free time and then I will end up wasting it playing on the computer or watching tv.  But hey, it’s all about the rest, right?