The Taper mesocycle: starts with a track workout?

Today's run: 5.6 miles of Warm Up at 8:45 pace and VO2 Max workout of 5 x 600 m

After Sunday's Long Run, the last Long Run in the schedule, the official Taper mesocycle begins.

I was fortunate to have lunch with Thomas today, as he is always a font of knowledge about these things. He mentioned right away that one thing people don't expect about the tapering period is that one doesn't feel particularly good or strong through it, and people often think (falsely) that feeling that way is an indicator that they aren't ready. Keeping that in mind during these next three weeks will be a good thing.

Thomas had also previously helped me rearrange the schedule of the last two weeks so that I could run that 10k on the fourth, and by through those rearrangements I wound up with today's track workout being the same as Friday's track workout (the one where I ran through the peak of this cold I'm kicking). Having the track workout today and just five miles tomorrow made us think that perhaps I should do the track workout tomorrow and just the five miles today.

I had arranged much of my day to accommodate this track workout, and I also realized that perhaps this week was designed as a mini-taper to make Saturday's final pre-race tune-up 10K the best possible. Tomorrow is a 5 mile recovery run, Thursday is off, Friday is a 4 mile recovery run with strides, and then Saturday's 10k. Just 17 total miles in these four days, where the average I've done for the past five weeks in the same Tuesday through Friday has been 27 miles. So I went to the track today instead of tomorrow.

• • •

I did my usual out-and-back through the park on MLK, and for a moment on the way back, as the uphill started, I felt pretty out of energy. Strangely, within a minute, I was distracted and I felt like I was going faster and without much effort. True enough, my average heart rate for this 8:45/mile run was 140 bpm, pretty low, and 10 bpm lower than last Friday's same run. My cold is almost gone now.

At the track, since I was there much later than I have been before, I found floods of people. I had to be careful about how to work into the stream of runners, and got caught up in my first jogging period by the pace of others (too fast).

Splits (all under the 2:24 target):

• 2:20
• 2:21
• 2:18
• 2:19
• 2:15 (on this one, my nose ran messily)
  

Pretty similar to all the other weeks, but didn't feel particularly tough. I again thought about letting it out on the last one, and then remembered Thomas' warning from earlier today about how it is in this period of time that one is most susceptible to injury. Still, the last one was fastest.


For the stat-heads: the average of all these 600 meter times is 2:19 with a standard deviation of 3 seconds, meaning I was 1.6 standard deviations below the target time of 2:24.