Perhaps I will call this a taper…

At the risk of sounding a little schizophrenic in my approach to training, a training schedule has to work for a runner. Not the other way round. And so I find myself really rather busy this week: there’s the preparation for the arrival of my partner’s family on Thursday, the duties of entertaining, a workday spend in London, another in Oxford packed with meetings…

So what are my options? Plainly I was home too late on Wednesday to run, Thursday is looking very unlikely (early morning already with the train, followed by the need to make an appearance in the evening), Friday has some potential (depending on meetings), and Saturday is an absolute no-no before the Bath Half Marathon. What started as a moderately intense week, with a long run, rest day and relatively hard-paced club run has turned into a succession of ‘rest’ days.

‘Rest’, however, is precisely the opposite of what I’ll be doing…

So, in an attempt to spin a virtue out of what looks like a very chaotic approach to training, I’m going to call this a taper. A dip in the volume of my training, without necessarily cutting out the intensity, carries all the hallmarks of a classic taper. This will mean I’m fully recovered to go run the 13.1 miles of my life on Sunday. Hoorah!

(Well, that’s the theory. There’s every chance I’ll be sitting on the train on Sunday morning, heading to Bath, mentally checking and rechecking that I’ve got everything I need, feeling desperately under-prepared.)