Yeah, it's the 14th. But the hard training is done. I'm in full taper madness now, like one of those animals at the zoo pacing back and forth in their cage. Last night my wife went over to her sister's place to help her with her new baby, and I must have spent 2 hours on the Internet reading every article I could find about the last week of taper and pacing strategy to make sure I was doing enough, but not too much. The Runner's World plan that I've been doing has 12 miles for Saturday/Sunday, 5 Monday, 5 Wednesday and 3 the day before the race. That seemed too high to me, so I was looking at Hal Higdon and a bunch of other stuff.
I'm way over-thinking it and I know it's just taper madness. I feel like I'm in good shape to have a good race - the only wrinkle in my training was that the first week of my taper was blown away by Swine Flu. I ran 20 miles on that Sunday, then nothing until Friday 5 days later. All that means is now I feel quite rested and ready to go. The only dangerous part is this is when I start getting more ambitious about my pace strategy.
I've still opted for the "less is more" strategy, though, planning to run only 8 miles tomorrow, 3 Monday, 4 Wednesday and 2 1/2 Friday. For pace I'm going to try to stick to about a 40 second/mile range - I'll start on the slow end of the range and use my heart rate as a guide until I get to 20 miles.
See, I'm thinking way too much about this - I should probably just go to the race without a watch and have fun!
