Taper For The Race
A good taper before your event will let your true fitness ride all the way to the surface.
Training can be a lot like booze; to have a great time you need to know when to stop. In the week leading up to a race or event, athletes can do more to undermine their training than they can to enhance it. Just like that 'one more' drink, it's the prospect of getting a little extra something that lands you in trouble.
Mental-health professionals say that sometimes the tendency to have 'one too many' is rooted in insecurity, and in my experience that's exactly what drives athletes to make mistakes in the week leading up to an important challenge.
Remember, training is stress, and in the short term it causes fatigue, which suppresses performance. A good training programme delivers the final significant workout far enough before your goal event to allow for both adaptation and complete recovery. For the majority of amateur riders, this means your normal training should
stop seven to 10 days before your event and be followed by a taper period. No matter where your conditioning is with one week to go, that's what you have to work with. But you can still control how rested and fresh you'll be at the starting line.
A week of easy spins would ensure that you're rested for race day, but to be fresh you also need hard workouts. Tapering is all about reducing the overall workload while keeping your body primed with intense efforts. To reduce your volume, simply cut back on the hours if your rides are 90 minutes then go 60, or make 60-minute rides 45. They don't have to be complete recovery rides, but resist the urge to test yourself every time you go out. Trust your fitness. It's there.
If you're preparing for a long one- or two-day event such as a road race or charity ride, your week should have one longer "super compensation" ride. This is to deplete your carbohydrate stores and get your body to jump-start the metabolic processes to deal with that scenario so it's prepared for the next time you deplete it race day. People ask me about carbo loading, and nutritionally it can work, but for long events I find a super compensation ride followed by a moderate increase in carbohydrate intake to be highly effective and less likely to disrupt an athlete's routine.
If you're doing a criterium or short mountain bike event, then you need to balance rest with a couple of short, maximum-intensity workouts in order to stay sharp without inducing fatigue.
For a long-ish road race (80 - 100km), follow Dr Jeroen Swart's taper week programme:
Monday: 90 min Recovery
Tuesday: REST
Wednesday: 2 Hours
Thursday: Do a 30 min warmup at an average heart rate, followed by 3: 3 x 6min zone 4 hear rate (Not zone 5!). Rest for 5 min in zone 2 between each harder effort. Warm down for 20 min in zone 2. (
Click here to read about training zones)
Friday: REST
Saturday: 1.5 Hours in Zone 2 and 3 with 4 x 2 minute accelerations to bring your heart rate up to zone 4 for the last 30 seconds of each acceleration (Use a relatively hard gear and lowish cadence (70-80). Rest for 5 min between each acceleration. (These are not supposed to be hard intervals)
Sunday: RACE DAY!
