This is tapering?

One of the key tenets of tapering is that you decrease your mileage, but not your intensity. You make up for lack of distance with speed work. The only problem for me has been that if I run too fast, I tend to aggravate my IT band injuries. Tempo runs at, say, a 7:30 pace, aren't too much of a problem, but any faster than that and my legs tend to be shot for several days afterwards. My workout schedule features two types of workouts that are faster than that pace: Intervals, and strides. With that in mind, I've taken those workouts out of my program and replaced them with a few tempo runs -- short- to medium-distance runs at faster than marathon pace. Tempo runs take a lot out of you, though, so I can't do quite as many tempo runs as I would strides.

So here's what my workout plan was originally for this week:

• M: rest
• T: 7 mile medium pace run + 8 X 100-meter strides
• W: 4 mile recovery run
• Th: 3 X 1600-meter intervals at 5K race pace
• F: 5 mile recovery run
• S: 5 mile recovery run + 6 X 100-meter strides
• Sun: 13 mile run

Here's how I modified it:

• M: rest
• T: 6.3 mile tempo run
• W: 4 mile recovery run
• Th: 8 mile run with middle 4 at 7:30 pace
• F: 5 mile recovery run
• S: 5 mile recovery run
• Sun: 13 mile run

So Tuesday and Thursday are now tempo runs, and I've gone from three speed days to two. My mileage is much shorter than in recent weeks, a total of about 41 miles, but the intensity is still the same.

In the spirit of my reduced-mileage plan, today instead of running into town, I just drove in for the DART run. Chad, Jeremy, and Chris G. were there, but so were two new runners, Adam and Sarah. As it turned out, Adam is pretty fast, and I ended up running with him. We went out quickly: Miles 1, 2, and 3 were 7:34, 7:14, 6:51. As we started in on Mile 4 I realized I wasn't going to be able to maintain that pace, so I told Adam that he should feel free to take off if he wanted. He said he thought he had started off a little too fast as well, so we both slowed down. Miles 4 and 5 were 7:28 and 7:45. I didn't have much left for Mile 6 but managed a 7:31, and we cruised in for the final 0.37 miles at a 7:17 pace. The pace was uneven, but we still averaged a very respectable 7:23. I told Adam that was about as fast as I ever ran that loop, but he seemed pretty tired as well, so hopefully he won't decide we're too slow for him.

I'm definitely looking forward to a 10-minute pace on my recovery run tomorrow. Details of today's run are below: