Ironman USA Lake Placid : Official Thread (Page 154)

I can't tell you how many times I've read:  "You will feel horrible" ... and ... "Don't test your fitness".   I'm just going to take it as Gospel and have faith and do as I'm told.

Note to self:  Keep intensity; we will feel horrible; and dammit don't test fitness!! 

WHAT DO THEY MEAN BY DON'T TEST FITNESS??  

This quote keeps running through my head:

We do not rise to the level of our expectations. We fall to the level of our training.

Archilochus, Greek Soldier, Poet, c. 650 BC

The reasoning behind tapering is that you want to keep as much as possible of the fitness that you have work so hard to achieve through months of training, but at the same time you also want to get rid of as much of the accumulated fatigue. When you taper you get rid of that fatigue but you can also start losing some of your hard earned fitness hence while the volume is diminished we still perform some intensity to generate enough load to ‘maintain’ your fitness – this will allow your body to recover through the process.

We seek to taper because our main goal is to perform at our very best on race day. When athletes race with partial or no tapering it just means that while they will strive for the best possible performance on race day; given their fitness-fatigue, the result won't be as good as if they were optimally rested (or tapered).

Most long course athletes in general require a significant training load achieved through months and months of consistent training and because of this, it usually allows them to achieve a few peak performances every season. For that reason it is wise to allocate priorities to races. Taper 100% only for the few you want to achieve peak performance, partially taper to achieve a solid performance on another few less important ones and don’t taper for those with little importance that you want to train through.

Tapering is very personal hence the fitness and training load of each athlete should be considered (plus genes, scheduling, life priorities, etc). Also, tapering varies for ALL 3 sports which means while and athlete might need 2+ weeks of tapering for running, he/she might only need 10 days for cycling and 5 days for swimming as an example. An optimal tapering schedule will consider all this and the profile will look different for every athlete athletes; this in turn will avoid the traditional “I feel like crap through tapering” stage many athletes experience.

In general fitter athletes could taper for a shorter period of time because their bodies tend to adapt and recover faster, however they tend to do more training hence might end up needing more days to recover to offset the fitness – fatigue = performance equation. Less trained athletes usually will require more tapering days because they tend to adapt and recover slower than fit athletes, however they usually tend to do handle less training load hence they might be race ready with lesser tapering days.

The whole arbitrary taper 3 weeks schedule is nothing more than a gross generalization made popular by some coaches/books. It basis has little to do with physiology and more with old misinformation provided by a general survey published many many years ago. This doesn’t mean it doesn’t work, as luck would have it does in many cases; hence many general plans use it. Still, one could argue that those coaches who apply this tapering approach for all their athletes as a "one size fits all" doesn’t really understand basic physiology or how tapering works.

Remember, tapering will vary for every athlete AND sport based on fitness, experience, genes, life priorities (work, family), etc. Through your training pay attention as to how fast or not you recover from hard/long sessions and heavy load weeks. Somewhere along you’ll learn how much tapering you’ll need.

You are the man Jorge.  Was wondering when you were gonna pop in again!