The Taperless Taper

Anyone who has run a marathon or fantasized about running a marathon or knows anything about running a marathon is aware of The Taper. It's that three-week period, give or take a week, after your longest training run. It's the period when you taper off the miles to let your body rest for the big race. This also leaves your body craving extra miles, and many people develop mysterious aches and pains that make them second-guess their fitness for the race.

That's all well and good, but I have no such problem because my training has been decidedly half-assed to begin with. So now that I've finally hit the taper stage, resting up for the NYC Marathon on Nov. 2, it seems like I should be running more, not less.

I mean, I never ran more than 30 miles in any week of my training. And I only ran 20 miles once, and that wasn't really a full run, since I kinda walked the last few miles. And I've been skipping too many mid-week tempo runs. So if I followed my initial, overly optimistic training program, for the final three weeks I'd actually increase my mileage.

Of course, that won't happen. I'll probably just run as much as I have been running, which has been embarrassingly little, though I'll start cutting my long runs shorter.

I figure I'm just about fit enough not to collapse at mile 13 as I cross the Pulaski Bridge from Brooklyn into Queens, and from there, I'll just have to summon up enough fortitude and power gels to keep moving forward into the Bronx and finally Manhattan.

Still, I got my final burst of panic this morning when I checked the race Web site and saw the countdown clock had dropped below 12 days. Yikes!