And so, the fabled taper begins. It’s the thick end of the wedge. Or the thin end, depending on your perspective.
The ‘V-Board’ is full of references to “taper madness”. The V-Board? It’s the never-explained name of Hal Higdon’s Web Forum. I haven’t given him a plug for a while, so I’ll just remind you that Hal is a legendary American marathon runner whose training programme I followed to prepare for London in April, and have used again for Chicago. If you want to know more about this remarkable runner/artist/writer/humourist, or to learn a bit about getting started as a runner, check out his website.
A few hours after arriving in Chicago, I should be at the V-Board get-together at the Hilton, where I’ll finally get to shake the guy’s hand and thank him for the help I’ve had from his schedule, and from our internet correspondence.
So anyway, “taper madness”. What is it? Hard to pin down or explain how it manifests, but it’s a period of giddiness/excitement/hysteria/anxiety that precedes the big day, and generally coincides with the taper. The taper sets it off, as its arrival finally makes people realise that the race is imminent.
Five miles this evening, at a gentle pace. For the first time since March, I had the experience of running into a night both black and cold. It’s a dramatic contrast with the long, warm evenings that I was squandering just a few weeks ago.
I took it very easy, partly because I didn’t want to be too unkind to my legs after their heroic Sunday, but mainly because it was too hazardous to consider doing anything else. There was a moon tonight, but strangely it seemed to have little effect, and I could see virtually nothing of the road beneath my feet. It was particularly precarious on the narrow, hedged lanes we have around here. It was like running through a tunnel.
At one point a car appeared, and rather than stop and wave it past, I did something stupid. I kept running until we were about ten or fifteen yards apart, then I jumped onto the thin band of grass banking that separates the tarmac from the hedge, with the intention of continuing to run while the car went past. But the grass bank was uneven and not too solid, and instead of a graceful, gazelle-like bound upwards, then back down again, my foot landed in a rut which sent me spinning into an ungainly little semi-pirouette that nearly sent me sprawling, and twisted my ankle into the bargain.
I didn’t stop but my ankle did make itself felt for a few hundred yards, and made me realise that the assumption that I’ll be lining up on the shore of Lake Michigan in two and a half weeks time is a plan that I shouldn’t take for granted. I could quite easily have torn my ankle badly enough to have had to have pulled out.
Lots of rustling in the hedges to report, and one very weird incident. I came to a point on the lane where there was a gap in the hedge on both sides of the road for about five yards. As I passed across this gap there was a sudden, massive sense of cold air. At first I thought it was a freak gust that had funnelled itself through the hole, but that was the strange thing: it wasn’t a breeze of any kind at all. There was no moving air. It was a sort of spiritual blast; a virtual chill; a fourth dimensional, theoretical, windless gust. I even trotted back to experience it again, but it wasn’t there anymore. I suspect it might have been the Grim Reaper, passing through on his way to patrol the last 2 or 3 miles of the Chicago Marathon.
Or was it just a touch of taper madness?
