let the taper begin.

okay gang, i rounded out last week with a 21 mile cruise along the lake. that puts me at 41 miles on the week and officially marks the beginning of my taper. coach b had me take miles 10-15 of the run at m.p. (i ended up taking them about 30 sec. faster) and boy did that do wonders for my confidence. i'm feeling good - physically AND mentally.

my mileage is dropping now in the run-up to the big day. i cross-trained tuesday, put in an easy 6 today, and have a hard progression run ahead of me tomorrow. so there you have it!

in honor of this milestone, then, i have decided to include a photo of my long-suffering and oh-so-reliable legs. send them your good karma! they've had a long road and it's not over yet. actually, it's nowhere near over! i can't help thinking back to the poster that hung above my bed for years as a kid: a vintage, first-edition, nike "there is no finish line." maybe i knew myself better at age eight than i would have guessed.

lesson learned!

thank goodness for the smart people in our lives who help us when we can't help ourselves. as you can see from the previous post, taking a day - ONE DAY - off of my training seemed like a complete and utter tragedy. i watched drew head out for his sunday run and moped around the house, downtrodden at my loss of a long(ish) run.

then came monday and my scheduled day off only made me feel worse.

then came tuesday. i hopped onto the treadmill for my scheduled easy 5 miles and, lo and behold, it was BLISSFUL. my feet felt good; my legs felt good; my hip felt good; my back felt good. my (admittedly slow 10.20) "easy" pace felt pedestrian!

then came wednesday. a tempo run at 8.40 with no problems. not even wih my gimpy fin!

and today, i'm heading out for a massage and another easy 5.

the lesson, then, that is week sixteen: get a good coach... and listen to her!

why is it so hard to take a day off?

after coming clean to coach bridget about my achy hip, back, leg, and foot, she suggested i skip sunday's ten miler.

i politely declined.

she then insisted.

i caved.

i know it's good for me but WOW was that hard to do!

i'm back! did i ever leave???

hey there! as you may have guessed from my relative absence on the blogging scene, the semester has begun. (have i mentioned before that i'm a ph.d. student in rhetoric?) alas, school may have curtailed my blogging but it has NOT curtailed my running. after some hills and valleys, training is going well. let's see, where to begin?

several weeks ago, i had an MRA on my pesky tumor and the tests came back "inconclusive." the tumor doesn't seem to be squishing my artery - GREAT NEWS! - but my calf still goes numb sometimes for no apparent reason. the doctor doesn't think i'm doing any damage but asked, "why don't you just switch to swimming?" thanks doc! that was definitely a bump in the road.

however, i'm putting my graduate education to work and, after reading about "the social construction of disease" in my biocultures course, i decided to make friends with my tumor and we've been running relatively well together ever since.

other than that, i'm into week 15 - FIFTEEN?!?! - of my training: my times are definitely looking better; my long runs feel great; and my FABULOUS coach bridget got me over a case of the MAJOR pre-race jitters. you know, those chuck 15 weeks of training out the window jitters.

thanks for the love! more to come...