So, a little background. I've been seriously training for a half-ironman distance triathlon for the last 22 weeks. For those of you a little slow on the math side that is five and a half months. I started in earnest on January 18, 2010. I picked a plan from a book that I thought was appropriate and pretty much stuck too it. "Pretty much" means that I did almost all the bike and run workouts and a solid two-thirds of the swim workouts. You see, I am a decent swimmer and am often not motivated to stare at the black line at the bottom of the pool any more than necessary.
Yeah, yeah. What about taking it easy. Well, the plan called for a half-taper week followed by a full taper week the week of the race. I have to admit that I was leery of the taper from the start. I put it in my calendar with an sense of unease for sure. During my last few "work weeks" in training I was doing between thirteen and fourteen hours of training a week. The half taper week had about eight hours and the full taper had a little over five hours scheduled.
Blah, blah. Gez man, get to the point or at least a point. OK. During the half taper week I blogged that I had ants in my pants. My wife will claim that the ants are always there, but that is a whole other discussion. Let's agree that there were considerably more ants than normal. Shall we? During the full taper, the ants took over. Sure, it was kind of nice to have a bunch of spare time. Heck, I even slept past 5:30am a couple of times. A forty-five minute run is easy to fit in. Putting the bike on the trainer, setting up the TV, etc. takes just about as long as a twenty minute bike ride does. Let's not even get into the fact that the same laundry is created with out said laundry creating the sweat puddle on the basement floor. We all know that your physical condition can be tracked by the sweat stain on your basement floor. Don't we?
But, there are a few things (in retrospect) I noticed. Because my training level went way down by food and fluid consumption did too.
I usually take a little cooler filled with fruit and yogurt along with a water bottle filled with Gatorade/Cytomax/EFS/Rehydrate (I do tend to mix and match until about 2 weeks before a race. Then I switch to whatever will be used for the race). I also always have a Sam's Club size box of fig newtons and bag of raisin in my vehicle where ever I go (There is also a stash of Hammer gels and Cliff Bars too in case a little pick-up is needed during the lunch workout). I sip the Gatorade before my noon workout and then fill the bottle with water afterwards. At the end of the day, I am eating my last piece of fruit as I drive home while sipping what would usually be the second or third water bottle refill. But, for the last two weeks, I got home and had to empty out my little cooler and dump out the water bottle. I also didn't even have raisins or fig newtons in my truck. The funny part about this is that I did not notice their absence.
A quick side note here. I very rarely eat when I am not hungry. Somehow, either through the way I was raised or through good luck, I just don't have the desire (I did not say ability. Put a pan of fresh brownies in front of me and keep your fingers clear. I think Julie does this to me just to mess with me) to eat when my body is not requiring nourishment.
Anyway, for a week and a half I was eating to fuel my taper training volume. I have every reason to believe that amount of food I ate for a solid ten days was not enough to fuel a half-ironman race effort. I also have to take the responsibility for not noticing what I was, in this case, not eating or drinking. I should have taken notice when Julie asked me on race day morning, "You're not going to eat anything?"
The verdict: Chris does not taper well. I should have kept the training time closer to what I had been doing for the better part of the year and just toned down the intensity. I should have also really kept track of my diet and fluid intake better.
Now, finally dear reader, to the taking it easy part. "Easy" is a relative term. Like training data (which is still mine and should not matter one iota to you), rest and recuperation is an individual thing. The body is a very interesting machine. Training input matched with rest is required to promote increased fitness (Note I used the word fitness rather than health. More on that in the future). I guess all the preceding words are leading up the fact that my idea of taking it easy might just be an easy two hour bike ride or one hour run done with a stopwatch running. I do like my chair in the family room, I just don't like being in it too much.
We will see. Like most things in this world, there is no instruction manual.
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