This should be my favorite week of training before my triathlon, because it’s the week I’m supposed to “taper,” meaning cut back on the volume and/or intensity so my body can rest before the big race. But it’s not my favorite for a couple of reasons.
1. I’m not where I’d hoped I’d be at this point. Although I have worked hard and have made great progress, I’m still questioning whether I’ll be able to finish the race. Most of this is anxiety, but I wish I had another month.
I did a couple of “brick” workouts and struggled mightily. A brick workout is incorporating a transition into your workout, for example, biking and then running, or swimming and then biking. I have no trouble at all with the swim to bike transition, but twice I did the bike to run transition and was really shocked how difficult it was. I wish I had tried this earlier and had more time to work on it. The days I did it were about 85 degrees, so that didn’t help, but still it did a number on my confidence level.
2. Once you are used to training hard, daily, it’s difficult not to feel like a lazy pig when you rest for a week.
Instead of being excited about cutting back about 50 percent on my workouts, I have the common problem of “taper anxiety” which inflicts a great number of athletes (did I just group myself in with “athletes?” That’s a first!). It’s the fear of losing fitness, not improving and getting lazy. In reality, the body is repairing the damage you’ve done from all the weeks of peak training. Without tapering workouts at least a week before the big event, you can enter the race tired, sluggish and sore.
In an event like mine, a sprint-distance triathlon, tapering is only necessary a week before the event. In longer events, it can be up to four weeks, say, before an Ironman triathlon.
There is some disagreement whether tapering is best using volume or intensity. The latest wisdom is that workouts should be dramatically shorter, but with the same intensity. Some trainers still suggest also lowering the intensity as well.
Either way, tapering works by giving the body time to repair micro-tears in muscles and connective tissues from previous training, increasing glycogen stores in the muscles, increasing aerobic enzymes,boosting blood volume, improving neuromuscular coordination, and also helping athletes to come into a race mentally fresh.
Even knowing all this, it is difficult not to want to get out and do one last, full-distance brick workout, just to make sure I can do it. But I will control this compulsive beast and try to do the laundry instead.