Blog

Taper

Silly me. When I thought “My taper begins July 2 and it’s easy street from here on out”, I was falling for what Joe Friel and Gordon Byrn call in the book Going Long, “the greatest misconception about tapering for an ironman-distance race.” Oops. According to Friel and Byrn, the typical three week taper has two parts – first, a two week “Peak Period” and second, “Race Week”. No part of Friel and Byrn’s taper includes simply dropping the training volume and waiting for the body to fully recover. Obviously Coach John believes in Friel and Byrn because after looking at my schedule and talking with him today, I’ll be essentially following their program.

During Peak Period my training volume will decrease, but not as drastically as I’d imagined (last week I did about 13 hours of training, this week calls for about 10 hours and next week it’s about seven). Also, my workouts are definitely not in “maintenance” mode. I still have some pretty intense training sessions on the calendar. Monday I ran some Strides for the first time in ages and Tuesday morning’s swim workout included eleven 100 yard sprints. This morning I got up and did a 2 hour brick workout, with some intense pick-up efforts during both the bike and run. I rode up to the Park and after a good warm-up, I did a one-loop/10K time trial effort. I did the 10K in 16:32 (over 22.5mph), which I’m pretty psyched about. For the run, I did the first 20 minutes pretty fast (probably around 7’s) and then the last ten minutes at a much easier pace. It felt great running fast!

The volume will decrease again during Race Week.

The goal of this whole program is to prepare the body to race (by doing race simulations) while at the same time giving the body an opportunity to fully recover between hard efforts and cumulatively recover over the course of the last three weeks. Even though there are some intense efforts during my training sessions, they are always followed by rest. After my 10K bike time trial today, I rode easy for about 25 minutes, then I started the run hard and ended it with ten minutes of easy running. After each sprint on Monday and Tuesday, I had ample recovery time to catch my breath and re-group for the next effort.

Happy 4th of July!

Here are some more pictures from the Philly Tri (the official ones):

Bike – July 1
Time: 1:00
Average heart rate: 110
Indoor ride

Run – July 2
Distance: 4 miles
Time: 46:41
Average heart rate: 140
Course: West Side Highway + Strides
Conditions: Comfortable, breezy, clear – nearly perfect!

Swim – July 3
Distance: 1,900 yards
Time: 44 minutes

Bike – July 3
Time: 45 minutes
Average heart rate: N/A – HR monitor was on the fritz, but it was a really easy zone 1 ride
Indoor ride

Brick – July 4
Total Time: 2:07:36
Average heart rate: 128
Bike:
Distance: 27.7 miles
Time: 1:30
Course: West Side Highway to Central Park, three loops
Transition: 7:33
Run:
Distance: 4 miles
Time: 30:03
Course: West Village and West Side Highway
Conditions: overcast, cooler, really nice training weather