Taper Time!?

Well, after a major case of the “I don’t wanna’s” last week…I survived. 

After my trip and fall on Thursday I felt like I’d been hit by a truck on Friday.  My entire upper body was stiff and sore.  Discomfort in my ribs (from where my heart rate monitor strap likely pushed into my body on impact) made it painful to cough and I was unable to sneeze.  A sharp intake of air was uncomfortable enough that it would stop a sneeze in its tracks.  Given all of that I opted not to swim that day as things just hurt too much.

I did survive our final 180K ride though!  The ride started out as a bit of a gong show.  We were planning on riding Highwood Pass, however more than one person told us we were crazy for attempting that route – with so much climbing – on an already hard day.  On Friday night we made the call to ride closer to Calgary instead.  We didn’t have a specific route in mind, just places to go.  We broke the ride up into chunks – a 50 km out and back to Springbank Airport, 30K out to Bragg Creek, another 10K out to Elbow Falls, return to Calgary and ride the 50 km out and back again.  This helped me to not focus on the entire distance and just think of the ride in smaller pieces.  It is the strongest mentally I have felt on a long ride so far this summer.

On Sunday I finally got that 4000 m swim in.  It actually went pretty well.  It was boring…but I survived.

And now we taper!!!!!  (If you can consider that a 14 hour training week versus a 16 hour training week is tapering….)