That special time of year, wk10

It only comes but once or twice a year, where you rest and your body starts to heal up and get ready for the big one. It is another one of those truths about marathon training. You are never fresh, you are always sore, tired, and beat up, at least in my experience. Until of course you back off for the marathon race, the taper. The purpose of the taper is to recover from the weeks of hard training, and I mean completely recover to the point where you are fully healed up and your body has time to supercompensate. Supercompensation is basically the result of the training effect. You tear your body down, and it rebuilds to a stronger state than it was before the teardown. Supercompensation, with regards to your marathon macrocycle is this rebuild to a stronger state on a massive scale. If your taper is designed perfectly race day will come when your supercompensation is at its highest point before it settles into your new baseline fitness level. As I say this I realize it is hard to picture without a graph. Basically you back off and you begin to feel like a wild caged animal and you hope that at the height of your caginess is when race day comes and you are ready to bust out a supreme effort.

Peaking is often called the 'art' in sport, I suppose if you were to do a great deal of scientific tests you could take the art and guessing out of it, but for the vast majority who don't have their own personal lab the ability to bring the body around to peak on just the right day is truly a work of art. To be perfectly honest I'm a crumby artist, however I am definitely feeling rested and healing up nicely so I feel like things should come around nicely for the race. I am on a daily basis, feeling better all around, psychologically I am feeling better than I have in weeks, months even, which is very exciting. Things are looking good, the excitement is mounting, here is how the week played out.

Early in the week I could still barely breathe and was very frustrated, but come Tuesday I woke up to pouring rain and was uplifted! I decided I would do along run if my breathing was improved and sure enough the rain must have knocked the pollen out of the air so I did a 22mile progression run but pretty relaxed and averaged just over six minute miles. The rain continued into Wednesday so I did a medium long run with a 5mile pick up at 5:20/mile pace which felt great. The rest of the week I just did easy 10mile runs with 1k pick ups to sub 3min pace to open up the legs and as a result I am feeling better every day, I will likely do one medium workout tomorrow morning.
Breakdown:
LR - 22mi @ 6:02/mi
MdL - 15mi w/ 5mi @ 5:20/mi
Supp - 1 - Strength Session
- 1 - Yoga Session
- 8 - 1k pick ups at <3:00/km
Volume - 80mi