Tapering is weird

I was an active school boy who never fails to sweat out every evening. It would either be playing volleyball, tennis, ping-pong, hockey, or whatever they have back there in school. As far as I was concerned, to be better at sports, you have to keep on training, training and training. You will only rest if you are having fever, or injured your body parts, or when the weather does not permit.

At that time, the word taper meant nothing to me. Never heard of it before.

Yes, I’ve done Olympic distance triathlon twice, but I did not train for them to my fullest satisfaction, if you can understand what I mean. And for that reason, I didn’t remember whether I did tapering or not. I was more nervous for not clocking enough training mileage that I never really bothered about tapering well.

Can a reduced mileage of swim, bike or run training just few days before a triathlon event be considered as tapering?

However, I’ve started my preparation for marathon quite a long time ago that there was a point where I felt training is becoming a burden. My training started off with building up the base strength, then increasing the running mileage from week to week, then peaking at one point, and now am slowing down, with the respect of tapering. Oh gosh, I can’t wait to get done with the marathon.

For me, I started tapering the next week after I reached the longest mileage training of 35km, which was 3 or 4 weeks ago. Now, coming to the very last week before marathon, things are getting a little bit weird.

Weird because, I have to tell myself not to go running at all in the evening as to rest my body and leg muscles. It’s like forbidding myself from taking daily shower.

Weird because, I used to carry my running gear to work everyday (to go running after work), and now I don’t bring anything to work. Can I say “I feel like I’m naked”?

Weird because, it’s difficult to digest that resting is part of the training.

Well, perhaps I should just live with this weirdness – for the time being.