The Taper

Well friends it is that time--the much anticipated, slightly dreaded, taper time.  For those of you not well versed in triathlon, or endurance sports, a brief explanation of the taper.  The taper is a short period of time before your big race/event.  This period can be several days to two weeks, depending on how long you have been training, and the length of your race.  During this time you decrease the amount of training you have been doing, rest more, in the hope of starting your race at the absolute peak of your performance level.  Train less, rest more.  Sounds great, right?  Should be the easiest thing I've done in months.  My body should feel awesome.  At this point you become totally focused on just making it to race day healthy. 

Intuitively that all makes sense.  In reality though, its often just the opposite.  The taper can be the WORST.  You can feel sluggish, tired, develop weird aches and pains you've never felt before...the list goes on. 

My taper should have started yesterday, two weeks prior to race day.  To start with, my taper began a few days early, as I got sick with a nasty head cold last week, and ended up totally skipping my last long ride of my plan, as well as cutting my last long run short.  Two days ago, I developed this weird pain in my left knee.  Not debilitating by any means, but just another concern rolling around in my brain.  Today during my swim, I developed a twinge in my left shoulder.  This to go along with the same twinge I developed in my right shoulder two weeks ago and is still there.  Again, not gonna keep me from racing, but another worry, am I gonna be able to race at my best? And have you ever had a muscle that twitches?  Like your eyelid will twitch or spasm intermittently for days at a time?  My left bicep started up with that mess a little under a week ago; its currently twitching as I type.  I also developed a sensitive tooth today.  Yeah, I'm that obsessive.

Having tapered before I know what to expect, but I didn't expect to feel this bad...and I still have 12 days to go!  Add to that this is my first Ironman--along with this comes all the uncertainty that goes with doing something new for the first time.  I might need to just start taking some Ativan every 6 hours prophylactically :-)  Luckily, I do have an experienced certified USAT coach living with me to help keep my crazy in check.