Tapering 101: Stay Busy to Keep From Going Mad

Today I was too busy to think about Tapering Madness. First I dusted off my very neglected workbench in my workshop and spent 3 hours cleaning up an old tool chest that I am restoring for my neighbor, Guido. Now Guido said that the tool chest was built by his grandfather who was a master carpenter. Based on a couple books that I have on early furniture building techniques I would say the chest was building the 1920’s or so as it was put together with nails rather than standard joinery. Guido though that it was from the late 1800’s as most of the tools that were in it are from this era. An interesting project anyway.

This afternoon I drove my scooter out to the garden and dug up our potatoes. With almost 30C/88F outside this was a good workout. It was nice to see that our small potato patch yielded at least 50-60 lbs of potatoes. Does digging potatoes qualify as cross-training?

Anyway I got home just in time for a frozen pizza and a salad. My wife had spent most of the day helping our neighbor’s wife Alex bake 50 cakes for a wedding, so she didn’t feel like cooking.

After dinner I went outside to lock up our shed and happened to glance in the laundry room what water the washing machine was spilling out water flooding the laundry room. Ugh! So my nice relaxing evening started out with helping my wife mop up the laundry room and doing some quick maintenance on one of the most important appliances in our house. Turned out to be a warn rubber gasket, glad I had a spare.

So now, almost 8 p.m. I finally have a few minutes to relax. Another day during Taper Time out of the way! Tomorrow I want to run maybe 16K/10M, but at a slightly slower pace if this is possible.

Seven days to my marathon at 9 a.m. on September 18th I will be standing with around 2000 others that want to run the Baden Marathon and about 6-7000 that want to run the Baden Half-marathon. Yeah, I’m ready!!