Taper

We are in the heart of race season.  Folks have been working hard for months.  Now races are upon us which means taper's.

So what is a taper anyway?  Under high intensities (high zone work, hard work...), your muscles accumulate a lot of damage.  The harder you work, the more damage. Of course, this is the idea behind the hard blocks.  But speed is developed in the recovery phase as your body heals and adapts to the hard work.  The idea behind a race taper is to get the body fully healed from the high intensity work while maintaining fitness going into a race.  So, typically you see a dramatic drop off in intensity and sometimes volume (although many argue volume may need to stay high).  The taper time varies by training program, age, intensity levels, athlete levels (pros tend to take less taper while a weekend warrior may need more as they heal slower).

Of course, for a taper to be good you need to actually taper.  So many athletes get caught up in worrying about how slow they are going during taper.  But speed needs to be put on the back burner.  I like to see athletes in Z1/2 during a lot of taper work.  Yep, you will be going slow.  So what?  You have already done the work.  You are not going to get faster by pushing the HR up.  You are going to RACE faster by healing/recovering.  Settle down there type A personality.  Sometimes to go fast, you have to go slow...

What I find most interesting is how you feel during taper.  It is quite common to feel like hell.  As the body figures out it has time to heal instead of saving up for another hard effort, all kinds of chemical processes are kicked off. A lot of 'junk' is released from the cells to be cleaned out of the body. And these processes take a lot of energy (and water).  So, you may actually feel somewhat more tired and worse then your hard weeks.  Strange, but this is how it goes.  You can become un-confident.  Settle down camper.  This is just how it goes.  You may get slower than you expect.  But this is in fact what you should expect.  It is tough with short course.  But much worse with an IM taper which can take weeks and make you really feel like hell.

The trick is to show up race day healed.  Rested.  Hydrated.  Ready.  And fast.  So, TAPER.  Don't do stupid things race week thinking you will get faster.  Reel it back in.  Relax. Enjoy the extra time.  And go have your best race!