Taper Tantrum in Threes

I'm about 10 days away from my Half Iron distance event.

If taper for a marathon is crazy ... a 4 hour event that's just running.... imagine how epic my tantrum for a Half Iron will be?  There are three events and it'll take me... oh.  How long will it take me?

I ~um~ spent a little time on Athlinks in the last few days ~taper~.  I have no business being there.  This is supposed to be fun, not competitive with self or others.  I am good at fun, but suck at the "not" stuff. so.....

I went for a quick swim today after class, before going home, and got a lot of thinking done.  For one thing it became clear pretty early in the swim that it was a good swim day for me.  If race day swim was that good I'd have about a 38 minutes swim.  But I set my goal up at 45 minutes.  I don't want to feel rushed on the swim, worried about if I am "going" fast enough, water conditions, panic attacks, etc.

45 min.

I also thought about it and determined 6 minutes on T1 makes sense.   No one was doing it much less than 5:30, and many people were taking more like 8 minutes.  So 6 on the first...

6 min + 45 min....

The bike is actually 2 extra miles.  58, not 56.  That'll add a few minutes to the ride.  I'm thinking just over 3 hours... let's just go with something odd like 3:09.

3:09 hours + 45 min + 6 min

Then T2 looks like 3 - 4 minutes average...  all this is going through my head while I'm swimming, by the way.  The math, the reminder that this is fun, the math...

3 min + 3:09 hours + 6 min + 45 min....

and "around" a 2 hour half marathon.  2 will be a stretch.  It's a good goal as I've run plenty of sub 2 13's in my recent life... but it's VA and it's probably going to be hot, and frankly, I'm not exactly rolling in on fresh legs.  Still.  Let's just say about 2 hours.

2......

6:03ish....  ok, sure.  Why not.  It's possible that I could be doing this in about 6 hours.

And why all this?  Well.  The ultimate thing that occurred to me on my swim today was, "who in their right mind would think that doing anything for 6 hours in September in the heat of the day was going to be fun?"

me.

Taper Madness.... 10 days and counting.