Tired Taper

I'm not quite sure why, but I'm feeling pretty tired the past few days even though I'm supposed to be tapering. It's probably still related to the cumulative fatigue of E3 and the long wedding weekend.  But it's Wednesday...shouldn't this be done by now? My fatigue may be combined with a couple fairly intense training sessions the past couple days. Last night, before taking Stephanie's wounded car into my dad's repair shop in Simi Valley, I swam 3,000 yards.  Part of that session included a 2,000 time trial at race pace (35 minutes YES!).  This morning, I cycled on my trainer for an hour, with 18 minutes of that session being at time trial race pace.  I followed that effort with a 40-minute tempo run, which was surprising to me in that I figured with essentially 10 days to go before IMCDA I'd be hanging firmly in heart rate zones 1-2.

Apparently not.

The challenge with this approach is that if I'm going on a tempo run, I want to see how fast I can complete it.  Maybe it's a combination of my extra stored up energy or sheer dumb competitiveness.  What I really think the issue is that I'm afraid of getting slower heading into the big race.  Based on Joe Friel's blogs, I know this is partially true -- tapering is about gaining energy and rest at the expense of some fitness. But I get paranoid about losing too much fitness to where it may affect me.  I know this is rubbish, but yet I run hard anyways.  Today, two of my four miles were below an 8-minute mile pace, which I won't need at all for Ironman.  My pace is firmly in the 9-minute category, not including the walk-run strategy I plan to employ.

Anyway, after this morning's brick, I drove to Santa Barbara with Stephanie for our wedding tasting. The food was outstanding and I'm very excited about serving it to our guests.  I think they'll be pleasantly surprised -- this won't be a "rubber chicken dinner" that's for sure!

I just got home and here we are.  After typing all this out, I think it's easy to see why I'm feeling rather exhausted.  I need some more rest.  I'm not sure when I'm going to get it before next Tuesday, when I take off work for the rest of the week in preparation for the big event.

I really hope this doesn't catch up to me when it counts the most.

11 days and counting.