Taper time!

People have reported feeling irritable, tired, hungry and generally crappy after the reduction in training in anticipation of a big event. I've never felt that way during my tapers, mostly because my tapers end up feeling more like stopping training — I blow off a few workouts for one reason or another, continue with a reduction in volume on the workouts I do, and call it good. Oh yeah, I continue eating as normal, thinking my body still is used to working like a coal-fired locomotive and burning calories faster than I replace them. Sound about right?

Further, I'm already starting to pack for my September 9 departure. The plane leaves at 6:30 a.m. September 10, but I'm crashing at a hotel in Aurora, Colo., the night before so I don't have to leave Laramie at 3 a.m. to make my flight. After my 59-mile ride today I took the big Polar bottles off my bike frame and tossed them in the sink. Immediately I realized I won't need them again until the race September 13. Same with the aerodrink thing between my handlebars. I took that off and set it aside, ready for its interminable journey in the big bike box. The list of things I won't need until race day promises to get longer as the week goes on.

Two weekends ago I took an aborted Saturday bike ride, then muddled through a five-hour ride on Sunday. Last weekend I was in Illinois for a wedding, and the morning of the ceremony I ran 20 miles along the Des Plaines River Trail in Lake County. The rides were crap but last week's run was far and away the best long run I've ever had in training for anything. Part of it was because I ran for an hour before getting in the car and looking for another access point, part of it was an abundance of oxygen, part of it was the trail being a hard-packed dirt surface, which beats the hell out of the concrete Laramie River Greenbelt. Nonetheless, I had a good run and wasn't even sore that night, so I had no excuse not to dance a bit (which might or might not have been the reason I went home alone).

The three-week taper is a staple with me, ever since high school. My senior year, the swim team had a collectively shitty conference meet two weeks before sections (the state qualifier). There always was that two-week break and we used to taper for the entire two weeks. Not this time. We showed up for practice and were shocked to see a 7,000-yard workout. Now my coach believed in quality over quantity, so we rarely topped 5,000 yards. Of course that 5,000-yard workout would go down in an hour-and-a-half so we knew how to hurt. That week after conference, coach didn't say a whole lot to us; he just posted the workout and went to his office, and we were left to our own devices. We swam 40,000 yards that week, topped off by 10,000 yards on Friday (including a set of 30x100, which we'd heard about at a meet earlier in the year). The next week, we swam 5,000 on Monday, 3,500 on Tuesday, 2,500 on Wednesday, starts, turns and sprints at the section meet pool across town on Thursday, then section prelims on Friday. Everybody on the team set PRs over the weekend, and we even qualified a couple of guys for the state meet. I know I had the meet of my life, so to this day I don't taper for more than three weeks because I feel like one more down week will compromise my fitness.

So I'm not concerned about my volume. I only did two five-hour rides and one three-hour run, which is the least I've done in any Ironman training cycle; normally you want four or five rides and two runs of the aforementioned lengths. Since this is my fifth time through this, I decided to go shorter and add some intensity. Well, that's my story and I'm sticking to it. I put my training plan on a spreadsheet and tried to keep up with it over the past 12 weeks. I missed more workouts than I'd planned, and altered the plan to suit my life, so much so that I have the original training plan in one spreadsheet and what I actually did on another spreadsheet. Quite striking.

In my concession to being silly during the taper, I've shaved my legs and grown a gnarly, two-inch goatee. OK, that's not entirely true. Rewind to the first race of the year, the Greeley Triathlon. With a pool swim and a strong swimming base (i.e., I was a competitive swimmer and can beat more than 75 percent of any triathlon field in the water), I figured I'd push the advantage as far as I could. Armed with Gillette Edge gel, one of my Sensor Excel razors, and two bottles of Rolling Rock, I smoothed out in a big way. It took 45 minutes because the forest on my legs necessitated multiple blades. I re-shaved a couple of times over the summer (to coincide with swims that wouldn't require a wetsuit), and did so again last week, this time with a Venus Embrace girly razor after my friend Kim told me the Gillette disposable girly razors would carve my legs like a Thanksgiving turkey. So yeah, I'm nice and somewhat smooth now, and I'll mow the lawn again the night before Ironman.

To understand how big a step this is, you need to know I've long thought it was pointless for men to shave while doing triathlons. This is notwithstanding a couple of skin-shearing bike mishaps, which cyclists and triathletes alike say is a compelling reason to stay smooth. Still, I've long maintained that my three biggest vices are Pepsi, beer, and hairy legs, and when the study comes out identifying those as my limiters, I'll give up two of them. All it took was feeling like an eel at the Greeley Municipal Pool for me to get on the sheer bandwagon. I feel fast, period.

The goatee, which probably cancels out any aerodynamic advantage of my shaved legs, is something I've done before three of my previous four Ironmans. It's kind of a point of focus, like a hockey player's playoff beard. Actually, it looks more like St. Louis Cardinals closer Ryan Franklin, only not as huge. Along with the leg hair, I might shave it off the night before the race, since I'd rather gunk up a hotel bathroom sink than my own. Or I might continue on with it as a point of focus, since I seem to need focus in the later stages of races.

Finally, I think I'm eating enough. Possibly. Maybe. I went with the extra salt in my Gatorade and it tastes... tolerable. It's a teaspoon of salt in each 24-ounce bike bottle of the stuff. My mom reminds me I grew up in a house where the head cook used NO salt in her cooking, so if I eat (or drink) something very salty, it's very obvious. As for what it'll do my insides, this is one of those things where I'll only know for sure in Madison, when I get off the bike and I have to run a marathon. Will I still feel like taking a nap in the air-conditioned ballroom at the Monona Terrace Convention Center? Or will I charge out the door ready to beat the sunset and set a PR?

Stay tuned. It could get interesting.