Taper Time

It’s possibly the hardest part to get right for a race. You do too much and you feel tired and obviously can’t get the best out of yourself, you do too little and you can feel really lethargic and just struggle to go to the best of your ability.

I’m now tapering for the UK70.3 race at Wimbleball on Sunday and will be reducing the volume of my sessions, probably to around 50% but will keep the intensity there. In the week leading up to the race there are two key sessions which I have. One of them is on Tuesday and is a run session and the other is on Thursday and is a 10 mile time trial.

The aim of the session on Tuesday is to do fewer reps but run them at a faster pace. A bit of a sharpener but I don’t want to be on my knees after the session. I just want to run them a bit faster then normal.

On Thursday I will do a club 10 mile time trial, I want to be fresh for this and push it pretty hard. Again I don’t want to be dead at the end, just get a solid work out from it.

Leading up to this week I’ve managed to get in some really good sessions, I’ve been doing a mixture of longer aerobic sessions and shorter speed work and I feel I’ve got the balance write and have seen a good increase in fitness. One of the days I did 201ks on the bike with a friend and then we went for 10k run where we started off steady and then picked it up and averaged around 6m 09mpm, I was really pleased with that.

I’ve also done a few 10 mile time trials, a team time trial which was 11 miles, this was actually really funny as we lost one of the guys on the first lap so we were down to 3 of us and time is taken from the 3rd person to cross the line. Our 3rd person was a guy called Nick Esser and he kept blowing up and then holding the wheels and blowing up again, all the time we were literally swearing at him. The lad managed to hang in there and I have never seen someone so shot in my life. My Dad said it was the worst he’s ever seen anyone look. Fair play to him though as we managed to win by more then one minute so it was worth it.

I’ve done some really tough run sessions as well, on a Tuesday there has been a group of us doing threshold reps around this park where we aim to do between 10-12ks worth of intervals with short recoveries, it’s a slow burner that one and if your not on a good day it’s bloody horrific, this Tuesday by the time I got home I was absolutely spent. I could barely eat my tea, just under 12 miles including all the efforts and 100k in the morning on the bike.

The Saturday Sessions are normally more shorter speed work sessions like, 400s, 800s, and K reps, but still at the park, it’s quite a painful session but the tea and 70p cake after it make up for it!

I finished this block with a 30 mile time trial at Somerleyton where I managed to win the event and get a 3 minute course record. That was nice and a good way to finish this block of training off with.

If anyone is interested in actually seeing more details of the training I get up to feel free to follow me on Strava http://www.strava.com/athletes/joe_skipper  

I’ve also been swimming with Lowestoft and Oulton Broad swimming club which has been good to me as I’ve had a few people to push me in the water. This has been pretty good and to be honest I actually feel as though I’ve been swimming much better recent;y, including leading into Barcelona I felt as though I was swimming well but I wasn’t able to swim to the best of my ability as I couldn’t see where the hell I was going. I know that won’t be an issue at Wimbleball and I hope I can do a good swim. I now my bike is on form, I’m running really well, if I do a good swim I should be in a great position to execute a quality race.

More then anything else I’m really hungry and super motivated to get a good result at this race, my next blog post will be after Wimbleball where I hope to be able to tell you all about how I did a good performance and not be writing some sort of sob story! J

Oh and after Wimbleball I’m doing Challenge Aarhus in Denmark the week after. If anyone wants to race this with me it would be great to travel together and share costs.

Link is below:

kmdchallengeaarhus.com

  

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