The Art of Tapering

My fourth ultra went off with a bang, a satisfying redemption after Kepler Challenge in December where I was unavoidably under-trained and Tarawera Ultra last year where I was disappointingly over-trained. This time around I had almost everything dialled in and I let loose on race day to take 1st place in this 50km trail race in a time of 4:18.

Full race report here.

Previous Attempts

A goal that I’ve regularly failed to achieve has been arriving at my A-goal both fit and fresh. The state we often refer to as “on good form”. My history shows that I arrive on the start line of my A-goals with good form only about 50% of the time. This has been an ongoing problem since my first taper in 2008. Additionally, most of my best races in the past few years have been mid block, with nothing more than a day off the day before racing. Look at Hillary Challenge and Tussock Traverse in 2016 and 2017. I had just a small taper for Kepler Challenge in 2017 and similar one for Oceania Orienteering Champs in 2017 to great effect. And check out this pearler from World Orienteering Champs in 2015 which is the complete opposite to a taper producing some top form.

The default taper in sport science, if there is one, is something like an 8-10 day reduction in volume while maintaining intensity. This is what I used for many years along with everyone else who I trained, but I was finding that my form would fall away half way though the taper for a week or two. No one else in my training group, whether it was road cycling in the early days, or orienteering in the years after, would suffer this fate. A hard bout of racing, common in orienteering where you run 5 races in one week or 3 over a long weekend, would almost always drag me out of the lull and launch me into peak form. Go figure!

So recovering makes me slow and racing makes me fast? To add to that line of thought, I often respond really well to overload weeks like training camps. This suggests to me that it isn’t the speed of racing that is kicking me into good form, it’s just the high total load of any big week.

Conversely, significant reductions in training load from a high load period disrupts something in my body. Consider elite tour cyclists who can’t afford a day off mid tour because all sorts of strange things happen if they go from 5 hours day to a full day off. Some degree of consistency is expected by our bodies.

So I tried not tapering, as in the examples above, and had really good results, but only mid training block. Once training has ramped up sufficiently in the second half of the block (for me that is getting above 12 hours is a week) things are harder to predict. With high load periods, I’m understandably on the knife-edge of high fitness and high fatigue.

The next strategy I tried was a more gradual 3 week taper down from my highest load week, 4 weeks out from race day. I would often set each taper week’s load to be at 80% of the previous in the hope that this wouldn’t confuse my consistency-loving body. This also looks great if you use systems like Training Peaks’ chronic training load (CTL) vs acute training load (ATL) to predict form. I use a variation of this in my training program calculator, but there is clearly more going on in this complex non-linear system than this simple linear model accounts for. I found that using this approach kept my training load too high, as the first taper week was still actually quite hard (80% of my biggest week), the second was moderate (64% of my biggest week), and the easy final week just wasn’t enough to be fully recovered.

My New Approach

So what am I doing now? I’ve brought the taper out to 5 weeks from race day. The first half of the taper period is about recovering from the period of high load as fast as possible. At this point I’m either on good form or over trained, the unpredictable knife edge I referred to above. Dropping the load rapidly from high to low will likely cause my form to go flat as has tended to happen in the past, but it’s also possible that I retain the over trained feeling for 2 weeks. Either way, it’s not a big problem because this will not interfere with race week. On this particular occasion, before Tarawera, I could feel my form go up and down as I emerged from my over trained state for a few days before falling back into fatigue again for a couple of days. I had 2 3-day periods of high fatigue separated by days feeling fit and strong.

The next step is to keep the training load moderate for 2 weeks by shaving of some of the easy sessions and retaining hard sessions. Adding in some races here is also fine as long as the intensity and duration is such that they can be swapped in for the usual hard sessions without raising the weekly training load. The oscillations in my form levelled off and the consistent and moderate weekly load I maintained for 2 weeks reliably lead me into good form. It is crucial for me that the training load here is moderate, and not low, to avoid going flat.

The final week is all slightly easier with 1 hard session 4 days out from racing to keep my body thinking that training is still in full swing. On this final week I can check my boxes:

• Not feeling over-trained since I’ve had no hard weeks within 5 weeks of racing: check
• Not experiencing random fluctuations since my training load was consistent in the last 2-3 weeks: check
• Not experiencing flatness since my training load was not low in the last 3 weeks: check

You can download my full training program and a summary PDF. It won’t take a detective to spot the deviations by taking a look at my training log on Strava, but most of it was followed closely.

Final Thoughts

This method is not exactly throwing away other coach’s methods, but it’s showing that there are modifiable parameters to these methods that should be tweaked to an individual’s past experience. The fundamentals of overload and recovery are retained, but the resulting structure might look quite different.

There are also some similarities here to some athletics training plans that incorporate a competing period into the plan. These plans contain a significant period of racing on top of the usual 3 periods, giving the structure: base, strength, speed, racing. This is necessary because athletes often have multiple important competitions, over the course of a month or more. While it’s most crucial to be on peak for the A-goal, typically towards the end of the block, maintaining peak good form for the whole block is optimal. A moderate amount of training is required to maintain the athlete’s hard earned fitness over this period, but the constant requirement to be fresh prevents them from training really hard at any stage in the block. Without the hard training their performance will drop off eventually, so it is only possible to sustain both maximum freshness and fitness for a limited time.

I’d like to emphasis that this is me discovering how to get my body to do what I want it to do. This is not me prescribing a strategy to anyone and I’d encourage readers to absorb information from as many sources as practical while learning what works best for them.