The Taper Caper

The last time I heard the word "caper" used tastefully it was probably during the Italian Job remake. A great word which just happens to go quite well with taper.

Anyway tapering in running is when you run less before a race to allow your body to recover and have fresh legs. John Ackland in his book says its to:

- physically recover
- mentally recover
- wake up the body

Since you also get capers on pizza - must be an aquired taste - I will illustrate the concept of tapering as follows:



Simple eh? Note the pizza is not to scale - there is more building than tapering going on - but I'm sure it was delicious. :) You can take the distance/run axis more accurately as "training volume".

Basically since Run Auckland 5 (10km) is coming up on Sunday I'm going to take it a bit easy this week.

Monday it bucketed down so I gave it a miss. Also getting quite dark before and after work. Mid winter in New Zealand with the shortest day on the 22 June.

Sounds like excuses?

I'll go for a shortish run tomorrow and then a very gentle jog on Friday with some decent stretching afterwards. My weekday runs I don't really stretch enough. Mainly all I do is calf stretching which is pretty lazy to be honest. Need to try and improve here as my flexibility isn't great.

Today also Week 1/Day 2 of the 100 Pushup Challenge. There were more pushups now but 90 seconds rest in between each set. The program was 12/12/10/10/max* (with max at least 10). More pushups but the longer rest between sets means the effort is probably similar to day 1. My max today was 23.

Note: The original pizza image is by "iirraa" and available from flickr. Enough with the silly posts - hungry now...