Kia Kaha

I'll be posting my spectator guide in a couple of days, which is mainly for my parents, but I've had a few friends ask for it again so they know when I might be coming through key spectator points.  But I haven't finished it yet, so hopefully I'll get that up tomorrow or Friday at the very latest.  The race is coming up quickly.  I'll also post the link to the athlete tracker.  I'm #877.

Registration starts tomorrow.  I was hoping to register over lunch tomorrow to get it over with, but a meeting got rescheduled at work and screwed up those plans.  Work always gets in the way of life.  It never fails.  So I'll register Friday unless I get a chance to sneak out of work early Thursday. 

Taper update:  It's going well, but I'm making last minute changes.  I want to trust all the numbers and blindly follow the plan, but numbers are only numbers.  They can't truly tell you how you feel, and right now I'm not feeling the way I think I should.  My legs are still heavy and sluggish and a little sore.  It's a tricky situation, because they felt worse yesterday yet I easily hit my numbers on my workouts.  But, I know it would be a huge mistake going into the race with tired legs so I'm scrapping my bike ride today.  It was just a recovery ride, but I think rest is better.  I'm still going to do my lunch run but I cut out the 10 minutes of tempo I had planned and I'm replacing it with two or three 20 second striders to get a small amount of intensity in the workout.  Then I'm going to go for a short swim after work.   To convert the changes back into numbers, I had 110 training stress points planned and cut it down to 50 (the bike was 50 points and the run was 60 so I cut 10 off of that).  I need around 110 to maintain my current training load ("fitness") so only doing 50 will mean that today is going to be well below my average training load so today easily qualifies as a recovery day and hopefully tomorrow my legs will start to come around and feel good.  


Tomorrow is a moderately hard day (85 training stress points) but not bad.  Friday is a rest day  and Saturday is a short race warm up so it's more or less a rest day as well.


Sunday is race day.  


For those of you doing the race, good luck.  Kia Kaha (stay strong).  Here's a quote I heard the other day to help get you (and me) through those tough spots:


"The body is evil and must be punished."