More on the taper

The stretching is helping. The best is when I lay on the floor, butt to the wall, with my legs straight up on the wall. This is usually a simmple ordeal that stretches my lower back. But the past couple weeks, it has taken effort to straighten my left leg. The damn thing is so tight, from top of the ham to the bottom of my heal, that is takes a constant quad contaction to keep it straight. Even the top of my foot feels like it is being stretched past its comfort zone. That being said, from a standing position, I can easily touch my toes.

My easy runs this week, which I would expect to be an exercise in holding back, have felt decent, but have been very slow. So slow that I'm shocked when I check my pace. What feels like a 7:45 is more like 8:15 or slower.

Still, I'm going to trust my training, load on the carbs, and go for it. I've had many good, fast runs that have started out slow. I'm banking on these short runs being all warm up miles and no warmed up miles.

The die has been cast. No more runs until a couple miles of strides on Saturday. In the meantime, I'm going to stretch and do sun salutations and hope that it's just part of the taper freak out.