{"id":546,"date":"2015-09-09T11:12:00","date_gmt":"2015-09-09T15:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/weareogre.com\/main\/?p=546"},"modified":"2015-09-09T11:12:00","modified_gmt":"2015-09-09T15:12:00","slug":"welcome-to-the-taper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/weareogre.com\/main\/2015\/09\/09\/welcome-to-the-taper\/","title":{"rendered":"Welcome to “The Taper”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"What<\/a><\/p>\n

With last weekends completion of the ‘build’ process of the Ironman Training, we are now into what is known as The Taper. During the last few months, there has been a frequent complaint about not wanting to take rest days. If rest days are tough, what is it going to be like for the next two and a half weeks of backing off and tapering into race day? Difficult is probably an understatement. But here is the thing, we know that most Ironman training plans incorporate 3 week long tapers much the same as a typical marathon plan. After doing some research though, that doesn’t look ideal. A better model, might well be to tackle the taper more like ultra-marathon, and endurance cyclists, with little to no taper.<\/p>\n

As hard as I find rest days, I concluded that the best thing for me is to maintain a fairly high level of activity, but nothing that is overreaching in terms of distance, speed or heart rate. Not tapering to short times and everything in the ‘recovery zone’ until the final week of the race.<\/p>\n

Despite being a complete newbie to the Ironman distance, working with a coach that has been pushing a shorter taper has been interesting, as I have used the 3 week taper for marathons, but never hit race day feeling ‘optimal’.<\/p>\n

So what does a tapering training week look like for me?<\/p>\n

Monday: 5 mile run & 2k swim
\nTuesday: 8 mile run & 20 mile bike
\nWednesday: 2k swim m& 20 mile bike
\nThursday: 5 mile run & 20 mile bike
\nFriday: OFF
\nSaturday: 4k swim & 12 mile run
\nSunday: 65 mile bike & 6 mile brick<\/p>\n

Yeah, that is ‘tapering’ the hard way. In other words, not really at all, and I think I like it that way!<\/p>\n

This is the sickness that is Triathlon. Once it gets into your blood, you start racing for the sole purpose of justifying the training.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With last weekends completion of the ‘build’ process of the Ironman Training, we are now into what is known as The Taper. During the last few months, there has been a frequent complaint about not wanting to take rest days. If rest days are tough, what is it going to be like for the next […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"image","meta":[],"categories":[18,45,21],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/weareogre.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/weareogre.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/weareogre.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/weareogre.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/weareogre.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=546"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/weareogre.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":548,"href":"http:\/\/weareogre.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546\/revisions\/548"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/weareogre.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/weareogre.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/weareogre.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}