But I'm too excited to taper!
It's come down to the final weeks of training, and the time has come to taper. Which is so not what one's body wants to do after months of building on mileage and progressively tougher workouts. Suddenly it's time to hold myself back, and conserve my energy for Race Day. This is probably the toughest part of any training cycle, because it's all mental. My body thinks it is ready to go, and it is very hard to convince it otherwise. At least with the previous rounds, I had positive peer pressure to help me keep my body in check, but it was nigh-impossible to keep myself in check on my long run this past Sunday.
Stress was a contributing factor, too. My Garmin decided to be mute on Sunday, so while it would signal my walk breaks on the display screen, it wasn't beeping to let me know it was time to take a walk. I certainly don't run with my arm right in front of my eyes, so my walk breaks were all over the place. Naturally I wanted to get home as fast as I could so that I could check out my malfunctioning running partner. So, for all that I was supposed to be running at about a six and a half minutes-per-kilometer pace, at the best of times I was around six minutes even, and often I was going faster. At least I stayed slower than my race pace, I think.
I'm not sure what was wrong with my Garmin, and with less than two weeks before Race Day I'm hesitant to start tinkering with it. I tested it out back at home, and naturally it found its voice once again. So, this evening I have a short, quick tempo run scheduled, and I will see how it fares with that. I've had this beloved piece of tech for over a year now, and I've never downloaded a single bit of data from it, nor have I updated the firmware even once. So, it might just be getting bogged down with over a year's worth of records on my running, and there might be some new update available that would help it perform better. I'm afraid to mess it up, but if need be I can get it to restore the default settings and reprogram it from there. I just want to make sure I've downloaded the records before I do that, in case they get wiped out in the restoration.
Having run a marathon once already, my concerns are definitely way less fundamental this time around. Here I am, fretting about my gear rather than fretting over the larger questions. That's just the difference between the first time and all the follow-ups: I know I can do this, it's just a matter of getting myself to the starting line. No marathon will ever be like that first one, which makes me wonder and hope that I savoured my experience of that first one enough. Still, that doesn't mean I shouldn't savour the next one just as much. It's just that comparisons will be inevitable, now that I have something to compare my current experience to.
I wish it were easier to live in the moment.
Stress was a contributing factor, too. My Garmin decided to be mute on Sunday, so while it would signal my walk breaks on the display screen, it wasn't beeping to let me know it was time to take a walk. I certainly don't run with my arm right in front of my eyes, so my walk breaks were all over the place. Naturally I wanted to get home as fast as I could so that I could check out my malfunctioning running partner. So, for all that I was supposed to be running at about a six and a half minutes-per-kilometer pace, at the best of times I was around six minutes even, and often I was going faster. At least I stayed slower than my race pace, I think.
I'm not sure what was wrong with my Garmin, and with less than two weeks before Race Day I'm hesitant to start tinkering with it. I tested it out back at home, and naturally it found its voice once again. So, this evening I have a short, quick tempo run scheduled, and I will see how it fares with that. I've had this beloved piece of tech for over a year now, and I've never downloaded a single bit of data from it, nor have I updated the firmware even once. So, it might just be getting bogged down with over a year's worth of records on my running, and there might be some new update available that would help it perform better. I'm afraid to mess it up, but if need be I can get it to restore the default settings and reprogram it from there. I just want to make sure I've downloaded the records before I do that, in case they get wiped out in the restoration.
Having run a marathon once already, my concerns are definitely way less fundamental this time around. Here I am, fretting about my gear rather than fretting over the larger questions. That's just the difference between the first time and all the follow-ups: I know I can do this, it's just a matter of getting myself to the starting line. No marathon will ever be like that first one, which makes me wonder and hope that I savoured my experience of that first one enough. Still, that doesn't mean I shouldn't savour the next one just as much. It's just that comparisons will be inevitable, now that I have something to compare my current experience to.
I wish it were easier to live in the moment.