Taper Week of Doom

Yup, taper weeks are tough to take psychologically since you're so used to keeping active.  However, listening to your body is important and any rest time can only provide benefits in the future.....at least that's what I keep telling myself

If not doing any activity is really bothering you, I would suggest just doing a "recovery" workout.  Nice and easy and keep the blood flowing.  Maybe some core work too.

Just don't forget, a reduction in exercise also demands a reduction in daily calories (except for the carbo load a few days before a race). When an athlete drops their training by 25-50% but eats the same amount of calories, he/she will gain weight immediately in most cases.

Tapering is nothing more than reducing training load enough to allow your body to recover while doing enough to sustain the maximum amount of gained fitness. Every time you train you get fitter but you also can get proportionally more fatigue. Think it like this, every time you train you earn fitness and fatigue points. Usually fatigue points worth more than fitness point but fitness points linger longer than fatigue ones. IOW you get more tired after a session but you recover faster and the adaptation gains (fitness) will last longer.

When you taper is because your main goal is to perform at your very best on race day. You are allowing your body to recover while maintaining your hard earned fitness. When athlete race with partial or no tapering it just means that while they still will strive for the best possible performance on race day given their current fitness level + chronic fatigue, the result won't be as good as if they were rested.

Since athletes can only achieve a few top peak performances (max) every season, that’s why they allocate priorities to races labeling A, B, C races. The A races are those in which the athlete will taper 100% in hopes to achieve peak performance, B races are those in which the athlete will taper partially to achieve a solid performance and C races are those in which the athlete won’t taper, still a good performance might be desired but not granted.

In the end, tapering for you will vary based on your fitness, experience, genes, etc. If you are following a plan just follow it and while training pay attention how fast or not you recover from hard/long sessions. Somewhere along training you’ll learn how much tapering you’ll need. Good luck!