Taper, taper, taper. And a big hunk of beef.

I'm officially tapering now...  just six days left until the Boston Marathon!  There's a part of me that thinks it's a little bit ridiculous that I'm tapering, since my weekly mileage for the past couple of months has rarely gotten beyond 30.  But for this week, I've decided to cut out yoga, swimming and biking, and will just do a few easy runs at marathon pace.

Sunday was the NYRR TGL Run as One 4-Miler.  I had no intention of running this race.  But on Saturday, as I was doing my last longish run of the season, an 8-miler with Matt and Mikey B, Matt wore the race t-shirt, which was a fancy technical New Balance thing.  And later, Peter wanted company as he went to NYRR to pick up his bib, so I decided to go with him and sign up too to get my free t-shirt.

Nervous about running too fast a week before the marathon, I decided to just jog it, except for the last mile, where I stepped it up a bit.  My splits: 7:15, 7:13, 7:27, 6:42; 28:37 total.  This was my slowest 4-miler since April 2007.  But I felt pretty good, and I'm going into Boston feeling confident that I can finish it without messing up my butt/hamstring.

Tonight, I'm planning to go to the Armory to do mile repeats with Mikey at marathon pace.  I found it really helpful to do some miles at MP before Chicago because it gave me an idea of how much effort I should be expending at the start.  It's even more important to have proper pacing in Boston because the first half is downhill.

And for me especially, I think it's extremely important to go out at the proper pace.  In Chicago, I ran the entire race with the 3:10 pace group, and they helped to slow me down at the start and push me along towards the end.  There are no pace groups in Boston.  The idea, I think, is that because everyone is lined up according to their qualifying time, everyone around you will be running the same pace.  But I qualified with a 3:09 and have no plans to run anything near that...  which means I'll have to deliberately run slower than the people around me, and be OK with getting passed by everyone.  This is easier said than done.  And if I go out too fast to start, I'll have nothing left in me for the 5-6 miles of hills beginning at mile 16.

So my big question is what should my goal time and pace be?  I was originally thinking of letting Boston just be a totally "fun" marathon, and setting a pretty modest 3:30 goal.  But after my relatively successful final 20-miler last weekend, I think I can shoot for something a little more ambitious, in the 3:20 range.  That comes out to a 7:38 average pace, which I think is pretty doable for me right now, as long as I run smart.

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This week is Mike Terry's birthday, so on Sunday I invited a few of the Front Runners over in my first post-new-kitchen dinner party.

On the menu:

*Iceberg lettuce wedge with homemade blue cheese dressing and crumbled bacon

My first time making blue cheese dressing was a big success.  And it couldn't have been easier.  I don't know why anyone would buy it in a bottle if homemade is so much better, and literally only takes two minutes to make.  I just mixed together a quarter pound of blue cheese, about a cup of mayo, a few tablespoons of sour cream (left over from taco night on Thursday), some lemon juice (mom sent me a bunch of lemons from the tree in their yard in San Jose), and some grinds of black pepper.  That's it!

*Broiled sirloin steaks

I got a couple of 2-3 pound steaks at Fairway after the 4-miler.  I love broiling these steaks for a big group.  It's so easy, I just put sprinkled some salt and pepper on them and broiled for about 7-8 minutes a side (which was probably about one or two minutes too long in my new oven).  I then took the pan drippings, and added some half and half, whiskey, and about a tablespoon of ground pepper for a tasty au poivre sauce.  

* Mashed potatoes

Yummmm.....  I found a perfect use for all of that bacon grease I had from making bacon bits for the salad!

* Creamed spinach

This turned out good.  But it was looking a little too soupy, so I tried to thicken it up with a roux.      I was in a rush, and there was too much flour in the roux, and it didn't fully cook through in the oil, so when I added the roux to the spinach, I ended up getting big chunks of flour in it.  Yuck.  So then I had to pick out like a million little lumps of flour from the spinach, and a few people still ended up biting into a flourball.  Ugh.

Overall, I think the dinner was a big success.  We topped off everything with a delicious birthday ice cream cake that John brought from Baskin-Robbins.  I still have the left over 1/3 of a cake in my freezer.  But I plan to finish it by marathon weekend.  

;-)