Taper

A taper is the deliberate reduction in training volume in the days or weeks before a race, timed so that accumulated fatigue clears while the fitness built over the preceding months stays largely intact. It works because fatigue (Acute Training Load) fades quickly once volume drops, while fitness (Chronic Training Load) decays much more slowly. A well-timed taper closes that gap right before the start line, not somewhere in the middle of a training block where it wouldn't help.

The mistake that isn't actually tapering

Cutting volume too far, down to a near-zero final block with almost no structured work, isn't a taper. It's detraining. A real taper sheds volume while keeping some threshold and race-pace intensity in place. Drop both at once and an athlete shows up undertrained instead of fresh. A useful reference range: a real taper week typically lands somewhere between 30% and 55% of the peak week's training load, not lower, and it still contains real quality work, not just easy spinning.

Race week is not a taper week

Race week, the final few days before the start, is its own thing. It isn't simply the last and lightest taper week. It usually calls for a short opener effort to keep the legs sharp, rather than more volume reduction stacked on an already-tapered base. Treat race week as "just another taper week" and you tend to under-load it in the wrong direction.

Why this has to be a rule, not a guess

Getting this wrong in either direction, too much volume left in or cutting too close to zero, can cost a race that months of training built toward. That's why taper structure isn't worth hardcoding as a single fixed percentage for every athlete and every distance. It has to account for race distance and the athlete's own training history, which is exactly why it belongs in a coaching rules engine rather than a rule of thumb applied identically to a sprint-distance debut and an Ironman.

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