Help me with my tapir

Triathlon Forum
1

http://www.billybear4kids.com/animal/whose-toes/Tapir1Yawn.jpg
Oops, I meant to say “taper”. I’m racing Powerman Zofingen duathlon (10k/150k/30k) in 8 days and I’m looking for help in planning my taper. I’m only planning to do 6 days of actual taper, with today and tomorrow training relatively hard (7 hours in total).

I’ve been happy with how the hard training has gone, and the past weeks have gone 12.5h, 12h, 14h, 16h, 18h, 16h, 16h. Zofingen is fairly bike-heavy so I’ve been keeping run training to ~5h per week (6h this week) and doing lots of riding.

Cycling has consisted of a lot of 2.5-4h mixed L2/L3/L4 rides in rolling terrain, with one 5h ride thrown in a few weeks ago. I’ve done one L4 effort each week, some of which have been 2 or 3 20min pieces, and some of which have been 52min continuous sessions which consist of 3 laps of a local park. I’ve noticed lots of improvement in my cycling just from getting more “saddle hours”. In March I did an all-out 60 minutes at NP of 280W. Two days ago I did 52min at NP of 311W.

My running has been fairly unstructured, with one long run each week (90min to 2h) and a lot of steady/fast-steady runs of ~1h. I’ve been running off the bike a lot and, since Zofingen’s hilly, I’ve been working in a lot of hills. Most weeks I’ve done some threshold work on the track (e.g. 6x1mile with 1min rest or 2x5k with 4min rest) but some weeks I’ve just thrown some tempo work into some longer runs, based on feel. Times on local routes indicate I’m running as well as I ever have.

So that’s it in a nutshell…training’s gone well and I want to make the most of it with a smart taper. This is the first time I’ve done a long race like this, or trained this much, so I’m not used to taking a lot of care with a taper. Any ideas or experiences you want to share are much appreciated!

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Anybody, anybody? Don’t let the lame joke scare you off…

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I think you’ll want longer than 6 days. 6 days is more of like a half-ironman taper. Having done American Zofingen, which is apparently quite comparable, I think you’d be happier with 8 days of taper. Definitely not 7 hours of training a week before the race.

I think you’ll want to do 10-12 hours of light training over the next 8 days with a couple days of race-pace efforts, and a couple short days of very short faster than race pace efforts. But very minimal. Keep your run intensity at race pace to <20’ NET for the workout, and race pace plus to <10’ NET for the workout. For biking, you can go <30’ @ race pace, <15’ @ race pace plus.

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Sorry, no good at tapering (doing so now for IM Lou).

But, when I read your title, I was briefly thinking of being a smartass and posting something about a tapir until I opened the thread … Nice!

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What you’ve shown us doesn’t look like a very smart TAPIR … good luck! :wink:
Dave

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Hmmm…so what do you feel would be smart?

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Great minds (or maybe hopeless comedians?) think alike…

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Thanks for the help. I think I’ve been hesitant to taper long enough because it’s not in my obsessive nature. After reading your post I cut today back from 3.5 to 2.5 hours and I’ll shoot for 12 hours over the 8 days. I’m trying to remind myself that I’ve done a lot of training (this is a lot compared to what I normally do) and that there’s nothing more I can do this week to get faster, but there’s a lot I can do to get slower (i.e. over-working).