bounce trounce

My taper has mainly consisted of not bolting about for the past two or three days.  It's a hard habit to break.  Resisting feels disappointing and even uncomfortable.  When I was a kid, my father tried to stop me from running up the stairs by making me walk up them however many times I'd run up them to that point.  Finally, somewhere past 40 reps, he got bored and I was left to dash with impunity.  I wasn't even trying to be a brat: I just couldn't help myself.  It feels so good. I've even bolted in various workplaces.  Stairs and working odd shifts without too many people about helps a lot.  Wearing polypro booties doesn't always, but I refrain from bolting around corners as much as possible.

Anyway, I've bolted only twice in the past two days.  It feels really weird.  This is the first bolt-free taper I've attempted.  Surely I'm very tightly coiled by now. 

And I've been eating a lot.  I'm presently eating kimchi and rice (I have no issues with chili peppers, just gluten), and then I'll eat some pasta.  Meanwhile, I'm also putting together my kit.  Thank goodness it's a loop course--I'm bringing what looks like a lot of food, but I will be able to get at it roughly every 2 hours/10 miles (hopefully I'm not slower than that--I'm really hoping that these trails are tight).  I don't know what they'll have at the aid stations that I can risk.  Even potato chips can be dodgy.  So I'm bringing my own, plus I'm going to bake GF pizza tonight and bring that too, and maybe some more kimchi and rice as well.  It would rock if they had GF hotdogs there.  Hotdogs are super mid run snacks.

Other things I've ingested during long runs and races include beer (before I found out about the gluten issue, but I always had light beers which went fine), ice cream, bubble tea, various smoothies including this killer beet-carrot-ginger combo a store at home makes, hotdogs, sausages, Indian desserts, Persian desserts, sesame balls, coffee, French fries, hotdogs, pasta (controlling volume is very important with pasta), bananas, stupid bananas, sushi, fudge, random Asian snack foods, meat-on-a-stick, Doritos, hotdogs, and Makgeolli which I JUST learned has wheat in it.  No wonder it really messed me up--it was downright malignant, that stuff.  The most painful time was actually after a race.  I was the only non-Korean at this race (I was actually using a South African friend's bib, but we figured that there wouldn't be an issue with packet pickup because all white people look alike anyway, and they do after a while), and so I made a bunch of acquaintances, and one of them gave me a cup of what I assumed was soy milk.  Oh, no, it wasn't.  But I was polite and finished it, and then I suffered through stomach cramps during a performance of Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas that evening, and then I went to my friend's birthday party (bar crawl? I can't remember), but I lasted until only 2 or 3 am because hair of the dog doesn't work too well with soju, got into a cab, which got into a minor accident, and the language barrier and cramps became too much and I bailed and spent the next hour and a half walking home.  I still miss Seoul a lot.

Anyway, with eating on the run, the trick is to take it super easy and let it settle down for a bit, and not immediately leap into action.  And I can't have apples.  Oranges and lemonade are fine, but apples usually give me stomach cramps unless I have just a little bit.  In general, I don't mess with fruit except bananas.

At any rate, I am going to be bringing tunes to this thing.  I've never run with tunes except on the TM and during one winter in Ottawa when I was running on the Canal--plenty of room on the ice--and those weren't even tunes but microbiology lectures.  Usually there's enough to see or think about without music (it's sometimes fun to determine precisely why I'm feeling so rotten), but I'm going to need all the help I can get tomorrow.  I figure the first 10 or 20 miles, I'll be fine, and then I'll likely be too smelly to socialize anyway.   The high will be 24 C.