Half Taper

I have a sneaking suspicion that I might be getting sick. Not sure, but just felt that slight creep of a tickle hit me. Hmmm, will need to monitor.

I will be rather annoyed if I am getting sick because I have a paddle race I was rather hoping to do this Sunday. I won't be writing myself off yet, but I will be annoyed if the race can't go ahead due to sickness. These things always hit at the most inconvenient time, however, there certainly has been plenty of sick people around me recently, so if I do have a cold coming on I won't be that surprised.

With this week being race week I am on a little bit of a taper at the moment. I say a little bit because the race this weekend is more of a B race and so I am treating it like a training session more than anything else. I have an A race in two weeks time which is one of my main focuses events for the season and the race this weekend is really a bit of prep event for that. My aim this weekend is to recover a little, but also maintain fitness with a focus on being as fit as possible for my race in two weeks.

However, in preparation for my A race I have also been training pretty hard over the last 4 weeks, so as well as being a taper week, this week is doubling as a recovery week. Training hard week in, week out without end is pretty unsustainable and so a macro plan really needs to include periodic light periods to help mental and physical recovery. The recommendation is usually that these light weeks are three or four weeks a part, although sometimes they can be as often as every two weeks if that is what an athlete really needs. Over the years I have found that I work best with three or four weeks of work then one week of maintenance/recovery before kicking into more work. That is what this week is, it just happens to coincide with a taper week, which was more luck than anything. If I don't give myself that recovery week my body usually demands it anyway either by getting sick or putting my motivation levels in the bucket, which I would prefer to avoid for obvious reasons.

Given this week is a recovery week I have been scaling the training back a little. Usually I don't pull too much intensity out of a recovery week, but rather just make the sessions a bit shorter. As I mentioned I haven't gone full taper this week so I haven't pulled that much volume from my usual training, but it is a bit decreased. The decreased training will mean that by race day I should be a bit fresher, although without a full taper I won't be a bag of beans. The half taper does mean that I will have maintained fitness during the week which will hopefully set me a good base for a solid week of training next week before a full taper in the week after, hitting race day in the best form that I can be.

Now, time for a bit of sleep to make sure I am not actually getting sick.