Less than four weeks to go...

I can't believe I am less than 4 weeks from my Ironman. Only once have I ever done an Ironman so early in the season, Ironman Arizona April 15th, 2007... and in that case, I lived and trained all winter long in warm, sunny Phoenix. This time around, my long winter training took place in cold, sometimes snowy New Hampshire. We actually didn't have too bad of a winter this year, but to me it felt like the worst one ever. So most of the time I've been used to training for my big Ironman at the end of July, since somehow I found myself doing Lake Placid six years in a row. So if that was the case, I'd be sitting here right now with over 15 weeks to go before the big race. Yeah, 3 and a half is a lot more scary.

It has also reminded me how much I hate the final 4 weeks of training. I don't know what it is, but it is usually when I can be found the most miserable. Maybe the fact that the weather is finally nice will change that, but we'll see. First of all, for some reason, it's like all I want to do is sleep. 6 months of build-up finally catches up with me and just makes me want to spend every moment not training sound asleep. Then of course there is the knowledge that we are so close, and being as light as possible is of the utmost importance, so eating is more stressful than ever.

Then there are the workouts. This weekend is the last really big weekend of training, which thankfully I will not have to get through by myself because a bunch of teammates are getting together for the weekend. After that, the taper begins. And for whatever reason, a lot of times the less training I have to do, the less I actually want to do it. Sure, I know I'll do it anyway, it's just that much more difficult mentally to get out the door. I am one of those people who responds quite well to tapering. But only at the very end of the taper. I can't tell you how many times I've gone on a fairly long bike ride two weeks out from my big race and had the worst ride of the season, only to come back a few weeks later and have a great race. I distinctly remember last year in my training for Lake Placid that it wasn't until my last real run 4 days before the race that things actually went well and suddenly I was running 30 seconds a mile faster. I guess I'll just have to hope that happens again this time around.

But hey, we've gotten some great weather lately. Saturday's long ride was finished up in temperatures near 80. I started very early in the morning and decided to ride the Kancamagus, which was kind of fun. First of all, it's kind of weird to ride by Loon Mountain when there are still people skiing. Second, the higher up I got, the more snow that was up there. An astonishing amount, in fact. It certainly made parts of that ride awfully cold, but once I got down the other side, it was toasty warm. It's only too bad that somehow I overshot that ride and wound up riding 30 minutes longer than I was supposed to. I promise I took the shortest way home I knew how, it was just too much.

Sunday was Easter, but you wouldn't know it by my day because I skipped it entirely. I stayed at my parents' lake house while the family was elsewhere having a little Easter brunch. It just didn't seem possible to fit my training day around Easter, and it's not like I could eat anything anyway. My sister later told me that my niece asked her where I was and she told her I was working, which I guess in a way is true. Don't worry, I see them all the time anyway, so it's not like I missed some twice a year opportunity.

Tomorrow I will be off to the lake house once again, this time to be joined by my teammates for one last big training weekend before the taper. Seems unbelievable, as it can't possibly be time to race just yet, but I do know I'm certainly ready for a break!