Simon was running 20km this morning so he ran up to my house for a 6.15am start for me. I just needed to get in a 12.8km run. Should have had some fartlek surges during run or strides to finish but knew we would run at a reasonable pace so decided that it wasn't a problem to give them a miss. 12.73km in 53 mins so approx 4.09 pace which is a bit quick but I have to say that I am finding these runs really comfortable at the moment. Pretty conversational pace on what is a flat run and only a little bit of wind. I really do enjoy these runs.
I read an excellent article in Running Times last year on "Peaking, not tapering" written by Greg McMillan. Here is a link to it: http://runningtimes.com/Article.aspx?ArticleID=14759&PageNum=1
Essentially, what McMillan, Pfitzinger and Douglas and Brad Hudson all seem to be preaching is that you shouldn't significantly decrease your training efforts, just your volume and that the most effective approach to tapering is to intersperse harder efforts within an overall trend of recovery. In fact, Hudson doesn't even really have his athletes "taper" he calls the final 4-6 week training phase "sharpening" emphasising race specificity. He believes that if you can achieve a handful of performances in the sharpening period that are almost equivalent to your goal race performance, your attainment of that goal will be all but guaranteed (as long as you rest up adequately before the race).
So, an 8.5km recovery run tomorrow with my heart rate monitor "leash" on to keep my HR around 130 and effort very easy.
Also, results of Bridges race are up on the WAMC website. Official time for me is 37.25 (I suspect this might have been when I was "paddled" rather than when I crossed the line but I'll take it). I was 42nd overall and 7th in the 40-45 age group, a big improvement on my 40.15, 71st overall and 9th in age group last year.
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