Final Preparation for Aviva 70.3 Pt 1: The Taper

Dear Aviva Ironman 70.3 Athletes,

At this stage of preparation, with the months of hard work behind you and a mere 2 weeks until the big day, you should all be close to your fittest now. You’ve done the late night track sessions, given up a social life for 5am bike rides, and rushed to the pool after work to get a swim in. Well Done! There’s not a lot more you can do to improve your fitness but how do you taper just right to get to the start line in peak form, feeling fantastic and raring to go? Too much rest could see you feeling flat and lethargic while increasing or even maintaining your current training load may not give your body a chance to fully recover.  

Remember that training session when you were able to hammer it up climb and drop the rest of the gang? Or what about when you felt like you were flying over the last few kms of a supposedly long easy run? Or that night when you could have swum forever? You may not have known it but at these times, when you were “in the flow” and your energy and power came effortlessly and in abundance, you might well have been “Peaking”- Triathlon’s “aligning of the stars”- where mind, body and soul are all in sync, brining you to powerful place where physical performance and self confidence are both riding high.

How can we time this peak for Race Day? What can we do to get to the start line with that unstoppable feeling? In my experience many factors help us to bring on a peak. One of the most important ones is getting the taper right.

Tapering:

At this stage, 2 weeks out, hopefully you have just finished a solid block of hard training and are feeling pretty fatigued. Taper is a period of reduced training load designed for your body to rest and repair while all the physiological adoptions occur. You may have heard some athletes talk about “soaking up” all the hard work- this is what they are referring to. Taper right and you will get to race day feeling fresh, full of energy and raring to go. If you train between 8- 13 hours a week, I recommend a 10 day taper. A shorter taper is needed is you train less than this.

Here are some general rules of thumb that I use in planning my athlete’s programme. Hope you find them useful!

a.    Tapering is not a period of complete rest. 10 days of doing nothing will see you very well rested up, but also feeling flat, lethargic and possibly carrying a few extra kilos. We all know you triathletes can eat!

b.    Keep the training sessions regular- the same frequency as before. Instead of skipping full days of training to get Rest, head out there as many times as you would do on in a normal week. Keeping the training stimulus regular will keep the engine purring instead of turning off the ignition altogether. You can also use the extra time stretching to make sure you stay supple.


c.    Reduce the volume. A safe rule that is commonly used is to reduce training load to 50% of total, 10 days out, and to further half it (25% of total) in the last week. For example, if you usually do a 16km run on a Sunday, run 8km 2 weeks out and then 4 km the week before. 

d.    Keep some intensity in there- a light 15 min jog will work up a light sweat but it’ll do little to activate the upper limits of your cardiovascular range that you have worked hard to achieve. By keeping some intensity in your training with short sharp intervals, you will still be stimulating all the right systems used on race day. Gaseous exchange, aerobic and anaerobic respiration, muscular strength, neural firing patterns, elasticity of connective tissue, cellular energy production; these are some of the important systems that you will continue to activate (in small doses) during taper to keep them ticking over. Here are some sets for you to try out that should do the trick:

i.    15 x 400m run with 45sec rest interval. 4 easy, 4 moderate, 4 comfortably uncomfortable and the last 3- HARD.
ii.    7 x 200m in the pool with 20sec rest interval- 3 easy, 2 moderate and the last 2 All Out 
iii.    1.5 hr easy- moderate bike with 3 x 8 mins All Out time trial efforts thrown in randomly.  

e.    Watch what you eat during taper, especially in the last week where training load is cut down drastically. Remember that your calorific burn rate is cut down as well so you don’t need to, and won’t get away with, stuffing your face after a short session. In fact, because of the reduced training load, you would be storing glycogen (carbohydrate stores) just by eating the same portions. No need to pig out at the pasta Party. If there ever was a time to eat healthy, that would be now.

f.    All the training sessions that you put in the last week/ 2 weeks, should leave you “wanting more”. Mentally this allows you to put aside something for race day. Physically, you want to perform the sessions hard enough just to tease out the right physiological response to keep that system ticking over. Don’t kill yourself on any sessions during this time to “test your fitness”. Trust in the many hours that you have already put in, overdoing any training session will hamper your body’s ability to recover fully.

g.    It’s weird but the fitter we are, the more easily we get sick. Top up on Vitamins and Anti-Oxidants to keep our immunity high.

In Part 2, I’ll be sharing more on preparing for the big day in terms of  nutrition, pacing, and some other important Do’s and Don’ts- So stay tuned!

Feel free to drop me a note if you have any thoughts on this newsletter.

Enjoy your Training!


Shem Leong
Athlete’s Circle Coach
ironguides Singapore
shem@athletescircle.com