Tapering
I’m tapering this week for the Kaiser Half in Golden Gate park on Sunday. In total this will be my 6th Half Marathon and I’m very much looking forward to it. With each race I gain a much better understanding of both the mental and physical aspects of running the distance. I rarely run in Golden Gate park but I think I have a sense of how I *should* feel at mile 3, mile 7 and mile 10 and I seriously hope mile 10 does not feel the same as it did in Big Sur last November. I recently learned the official term for it - I “bonked”. What kind of word is “bonked”? All that hard work pushing the first 10 miles to the point my body felt like a 600 pound rock and my will was reduced to shreds and the word to describe has zero gravitas
My training for the year thus far has been fairly good so I think Sunday should go reasonably well. Having just registered this week for the 26.2 miles in July has put a new spin on it however. 13.1 miles has always felt extremely far to me and a year ago it was a tremendous achievement - indeed one I wasn’t sure I could achieve at the outset. Now I look at my training calendar and see planned runs of 15,17,19,21 miles… and it’s changing my perspective. Makes me wonder what I’ve gotten myself into. I do look forward to Sunday though and the shared experience of thousands of people anticipating the start, pushing through the miles and enjoying the satisfaction of finishing. I hope at the end of it it’ll seem reasonable that I could run double the distance in a few months but something tells me that may not be the case.
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