Taper

Ironman Canada is less than two weeks away. Time to taper. Yesterday I swam for 45 minutes and even that felt long. I must be tired. I slept a lot and today I felt better.

I have been doing a lot of "technique" swim sessions but I doubt that it will matter much. As for one I have not made much progress. I am still having trouble breathing every other stroke and when it comes to breathing on the "other" side, I am nowhere near comfortable there. So I guess I will be looking at another 1:20:00+ swim. Not much hope for Hawaii with swims like that.

I do hope however that the bike is better than Lake Placid. There I ran out of steam at mile 90 or so, right before the final climb. Canada has an equally hard bike leg but at least the last 10+ miles are downhill instead of up. If nothing else, some time to recover before the run.

I rode 10 intervals today. Without a speedometer it was difficult to judge how fast I went but I felt good and I rode hard. I am even a little tired now. Not tired as one is from riding long, but tired from a hard effort. I only rode 1:45 so I should recover quickly.

The thing to do now is to watch my diet. I don't want to gain weight during the taper. The best remedy is to follow an Atkins diet and then stock up on carbs in the last 2-3 days before the race (this is known as the conventional carbo-loading cycle), but I doubt that it will work well in my current conditions. It is hard to stick to a no carb diet when everyone else is eating as usual. So I will just try to avoid the most blatant carbs.

My attempt at carbo-loading prior to Lake Placid failed rather miserably and I suspect this time too it won't go very far, but we will try to do better, and see.