I’m two days into a taper for IM Wisconsin, I’m bored and hungry. I hate this.
Does anyone have any good research stating that a 300 mile bike week leading up to an IM is a good thing?
Maybe in the future, I’ll just train for IMs, and won’t bother to race them…
Read this thread:
and the accompanying piece by Mitch Gold. Many smart guys who are much faster than myself contributed to this thread. I think the general feeling was one week or real taper should suffice. You want to rest early and train almost like normal so you don’t feel totally off but don’t go overboard with rest either.
I was almost tempted to enter the Canadian Full Iron distance event this weekend in my hometown on my typical B race 2 day taper and see what happens, but I really don’t feel like doing a full ironman just as an experiment on a field study of one person just to find out the outcome 
All I needed to hear…I’m charging my light for tomorrow morning! WHOO HOO!
In reality, I’ve got to hold back a bit, as I’m doing a VO2 Max test on Wed at UW. I’ve had good luck with utilizing the zones determined in training, and figure they may as well be fine tuned for the race.
But after the test…4am rides!!!
I think if you read through the thread, no one is saying go nuts, but keep training like normal if you want to feel normal.
For every other event known to mankind a one week taper is pretty well widely accepted, so what’s with the 2-3 week drawn out things for Ironman ?
Well…training for me this year has been going nuts (25-30 hr weeks). I convinced my wife it was necessary after my first IM last year and so far she’s buying it. I’ll ride this wave until it crashes!
In reality, I’m planning on an 8 hour week next week, with no run longer than 10k after Thursday of this week. (The pounding doesn’t strike me as a good way to be ready)
It’s the total rest days that kill me and today is one of them.
Another interesting observance of mine on tapering…I find that I do my best long distance workouts in a particular schedule. I’ve been playing with this over the summer, so I haven’t fine-tuned it yet. I do the 3 week train, 1 week rest schedule. I find that my best performance is always the middle week out of the three (probably for good reason), so I plan on doing a half IM in training in my next 3 week cycle to see how things go. BTW-the week off is 90% off, with a 5k run and a 20 mile bike at moderate to easy pace to keep the legs moving. I don’t yet know how this translates into IM distance, but it seems to work well for me in training.