Tapering for a race

The taper is the last few weeks before your main race. Training volume drops so that fatigue goes away and fitness stays. Put simply, you stop piling on load and let your body absorb it.

How long it lasts and how much volume drops#

TriCoo takes normal volume as the smaller of two: your schedule and the last load week you actually did. If your last weeks were shorter than planned, the taper starts from what really happened. After rounding and fitting sessions into days, the total can differ a little from the percentage.

What stays in the plan#

Short efforts at a familiar pace stay. They do not tire you, but they remind the body how to work fast. The number of sessions in a week stays almost the same, each one gets shorter. There are no threshold tests in a taper.

In the first week of the taper there can be a familiar brick, if bricks were already in the plan. Its run is 60% of normal.

What is known about it#

The main idea has strong support: about two weeks of cutting volume by 41 to 60 percent while keeping the intensity helps performance (Bosquet and colleagues, 2007). Three weeks for a full distance and the exact percentage steps are TriCoo rules. They do not follow directly from that review.

A secondary race#

Not every race is your main one. A B race gets a short taper: for 3 days before it the load drops to 70%. A C race has no separate taper, it fits into a normal week. You set race priorities yourself when you add a race.

After any race, even a short one, you need rest, whatever letter the race has.