BlogApril 9, 2007 Tapering for Ironman Arizona It's now taper-time in Arizona and my battle-wounds appear to be healing up nicely. The California 70.3 left my feet battered and my main focus the last five days has been to take care of them and get these blisters recovered by Ironman Arizona. The pre-Ironman taper is a special thing I haven't nailed down yet but most triathletes feel that a controlled decline in workload is essential as they approach their "big day". My taper this year ended with California Half IM being the last hard workout 15 days before IMAZ. This week i will train 12 hours, and perhaps i'll train 10 hours the week before the race. Lots of big names are coming down to Arizona this year competing for the top prize and the oh-so-valuable Kona IM World Championship slots. I'm very excited about this as excellent competition always helps me race better. The date seems to work perfectly for those professionals looking to do another ironman aside from Kona, as it sit's at the opposite end of the calendar. This is why you get the top pros who are ALSO doing Kona showing up here. The names to look for out there for those of you watching or racing are; Tim Deboom, Michael Lovato, Lothar Leder, Ain-Alar Juhanson, Sergio Marques, and Dave Harju, in about that order. Sorry if you're superfast and I left you off my short list, these are the guys who first came to mind. Marc and I have prepared to the best of our ability. As you can see in my earlier blogs, I've trained fairly normally this year aside from every Saturday where we absolutely buried ourselves with sun-up to sun-down training. Many of these Saturdays were followed by a short race on Sunday and I was always happy with how well we were able to do after being so worked over on Saturday. For me, this training worked very well. When I used to train very hard a lot of the time, I was tired all of the time. Now I'm only very tired a couple of days a week, and the rest of the time I feel fantastic! Just like everything Ironman, our final prep-taper is LONG. What's up with 3-5 weeks of tapering before our big competition? Does it take this long to talk yourself in or out of doing the darn thing? As far as i know, other sports don't have this kind of "final prep" involved. Here are some sports that I've participated in at the world-class level and what we did to get ready: Olympic Bobsledder: I did this sport in my youth, of course at a very high level. To prepare for the big day the four of us spent a couple of hours in our hotel bathtub with our eyes closed going over the course lay-out in our heads. Definitely not five weeks of final prep here, but quite-challenging in Eastern-European minitubs. Prize Fighting Boxer: This always depended who I was getting in the ring with. The time I fought Sugar-Ray Leonard I was about ten pounds over weigh-in two days before the fight. I spent the next 36 hours wrapped in saran shadow boxing in the steam room. Champion Dogsled Musher: As always my focus while mushing being more about the dogs I would be sure to pack enough wet dog food for the Iditarod race across Alaska. They always seemed to mush-the-heck out've the course whenever they ate the wet stuff, among the freezing temperatures. So as you can see, none of this compares to the work we all do in final prep for Ironman... It also describes fairly insensitively how the general public, whatever that means, perceives what we do to get ready an Ironman. If the final 3-5 weeks taper is more-or-less "recovery" then what did we all do prior that requires recovering from? The answer is A LOT, and it's essential that we all stick to our plan that we set out, or a professional coach lined up for us. I see so many people really hurt themselves in their final preparations because they listen to some joker like me tell them what they should or shouldn't be doing. Whatever got you to this point, stick to it now! We all will be hopping in that lake in just eight days and now we should be thinking about things more in terms of what will hurt us rather than what's going to help us. Now that I got that over with, I can't describe how excited I am about the new TriScottsdale.com website. It's really the most comprehensive race-site I've seen and we're excited about unleashing it to the community. Of course the Tri for a Cure taking off like it has also makes me ecstatic. Who thought of putting this race on May the 12th, Mother's Day? Genius. Also a quick thanks to my sponsors Max Muscle Mcormick Ranch, Wellements, and Right Toyota. Thanks to you guys on April 15th i get to run around Tempe for eight hours and twenty minutes in the most beautiful blue spandex I've ever seen! The best to everyone, Lewis « Back to Blogs |
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