I’m wondering how your body reacts towards then end of your week and how does that play a role on you mentally. I guess now that I have few races under my belt this year I’d like to know what you guys feel and are doing to make sure you perform as you did back in April and May. I know I’m still searching for what kicks my motivation to race around this time of the year. I got no symptoms of overtraining or anything but my body is like in a survival mode kind of feeling. Like if I go to hard in a training session I might regret it the next few days or so, but some days is like I can just hit it on all kinds of directions with no problem.
I hate tapering and always feel pretty bad during it. I get bored, eat too much and start feeling out of shape. As a result, I tend not to taper as long as most.
I feel fat. Oh wait, I am fat. Seriously, I start to gain weight almost instantly, because I’m lazy and figure that I’ve earned a cheeseburger and a beer now instead of waiting until after the race. Instead of feeling fresh and motivated, which is how I think I should feel, I feel slow and sleepy. I think it has to do with the anxiety of the race?
I believe that most athletes, myself certainly included, usually feel pretty bad for the first part of taper. The closer you get to the event, the better you start to feel. This is all assuming that you’re doing it correctly. I’ve had multiple coaches tell me that you shouldn’t worry if you feel bad during your taper. Worry if you feel good!
Ex-swimmers have a few advantages in this sport, and here’s another one. When I tapered, i’d get really nervous if I DIDN’T feel like shit during taper. The worse I felt, the happier I was, because I knew I was gonna taper well. A friend of mine (1:51 in the 200 back) told me he got nervous if he feels good 2 days before our taper meet!
Your body needs to transition from tired to rebuilding to rested, and it’s gonna feel like crap during that transition. You’re supposed to feel like crap. In swimming, your taper really determines how you do in your ‘A’ race. In Ironman, your training is all that really matters (unless you’re at the pointy end of the race). And as my coach used to say, “taper is not a ticket to no-pain land.” So either way, if the training’s been done, you’ll do awesome! Enjoy taper!
The biggest problem I see in people, besides feeling crapy taper week, is that they start to feel good, and then go out and test themselves. The miles tick by so fast and effortless, and they overdo it… You have to trust your taper, not test it…Once you have that good feeling, it will last for many, many days… Too much rest is not a problem, when talking days…
Mmmmm…taper. We do have an advantage. Second guessing one’s taper is the kiss of death! Second guessing the entire idea of tapering must be like the kiss of death squared!
I have done the training and the resting and I feel good about that, you just want to feel unstopable the big day. I’m going to Chattanooga Waterfront this weekend and I feel like all this week I did not have the usual energy or motivation to even go for the 30 min run. I know it is this taper thing because as soon as I start running 20-30 min into it I just don’t want to stop, its just tought to get up and do it. I just hope I can explode that day.
I usually feel like a pile of shit at the beginning of my taper. I think this is because your body goes into extreme recovery mode when you stop training super hard, so you are always tired/sore/slow. I always seem to be extremely hungry as well, which sucks, because I know I should not be packing down the calories, unless I want to have a few extra lbs to lug around on race day.
I feel crappy during a taper AND during rest weeks. After 1 hard workout, I feel better than ever. I’ve been told (as many have said here) that its your body rebuilding itself. Just don’t burn up your newfound recovery 2 days before your big race, and you’ll be OK.
I generall feel tired all the way up until Saturday afternoon. Not go to sleep tired but that tired you get when you have had a long block of training and have to fit that 90 minute run in after work one day and can’t get the energy/motivation to put on your shoes. I get a headache for most of Thursday and Friday that is either due to Carnitine loading or Carb loading.
Now that I remember two years ago on the Monday of my tapering week I got really sick with some food poisoning. I was sick as a dog for about 48 hours vomiting and everything else. I thought that my race taper was over and that my race was just going to suck. But actually on race day I beleive I had one heck of performance. I was very surprise to have felt like that.