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Taper Crazies

Good Morning!

I hope everyone enjoyed their 4th of July weekend! I'm not a huge fan of holidays in general, being a creature of habit and schedules and all but 4th of July is particularly troublesome for me because I also don't like staying up late or loud noises.

I'm beyond old lady status.

But on the bright side the incessant noise scored me some extra cuddles with my pup who after a full day of just being angry and barking at the noise gave in to her fear.



I tried to carry on as normal as possible all weekend but I've got big things happening this July and it's making me totally CRAZY. Saturday is the Ironman Muncie relay and if you recall, I was dumb enough to claim the swimmer spot. I've raced a lot so it's not like I'm not used to training, tapering, carbing, butterflies and being generally insane but this is different. All of the races I've done have been on land or at least had a land component but this swim only thing is just completely new territory.

During a tri I'm always working with the exertion/conservation ratio and never quite going all out because there's always more to do. Endurance running is the same way, slow and steady right? Well this is different. I've only doing one other relay and I was the anchor leg and didn't feel as much pressure as I do now. There are strict time limits on this race and starting in the last wave and truly only having 70 minutes to get through the course scares the poo out of me! I have to make that time cutoff and have a good swim to even give my relay teammates a chance to get on the course.

Right now I'm swimming the 2000 ish meters in around 56 minutes consistently. On a good day I'm closer to 52, on a bad day, closer to 60 which still gives me a slight buffer. However, I like to play the worst case scenario game which would be me panicking, flapping around and freaking out unnecessarily and adding 20 minutes onto my already sub par time. Best case scenario, I catch someone's draft, don't freak out and cruise in close to 50 minutes.

  From our church handout this week

Taper crazies give you a lot of time so in addition to panicking for no reason over a race I can't really control, I also built a desk and am now joining you from my new workstation! I love love love it! My new desk isn't bulky like the old one and it's set in my "dining room" so I'm not completely disconnected from the rest of the house and my dog doesn't stand at the gate crying because I'm in a room she's not allowed in (she'll eat all the cat food). I also moved our desktop computer out to the new desk so the laptop can stay put in the living room. Before I could build and set up the new desk I of course had to clean my house. Then continue my studies, take more practice tests and outline what exactly I need to study before test day.

Today I get to swim again (hooray!) and have a little run scheduled for that silly marathon. I may take it super easy on the runs this week to actually head into a race fresh and rested (first time for everything). I really am looking forward to race day though. As long as I don't screw it up for everyone it should be really really fun and afterwards my sister and I are heading further into Indiana to watch a friend finish up the 160 mile RAIN ride across the state! Talk about motivation.

I have a lot of fun things coming up and I'm so excited about them even if it makes me a little crazy. Soon enough I'll be back on heavy mileage, missing having a race in less than a week and wishing for the energy that comes from the taper crazies!

Comments

  1. I need to redo my desk area myself.
    Look at you & all your busy race/training stuff... go girl!
    (FYI - I started doing a vlog thing on my fitness blog thanks to your YouTube videos... I love you're doing that)

    ReplyDelete

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