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 instead of somewhere in the middle of a training block where it wouldn't help.

The mistake that isn't actually tapering

Cutting volume too far — 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; dropping both at once is how an athlete shows up undertrained rather than fresh. A useful reference range: a real taper week typically lands somewhere around 30–55% 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 itself — the final few days before the start — is its own thing, not simply the last and lightest taper week. It usually involves a short opener effort to keep the legs sharp rather than more volume reduction on top of an already-tapered base. Treating race week as "just another taper week" tends to under-load it in the wrong direction.

Why this has to be a rule, not a guess

Because getting this wrong in either direction — too much volume left in, or cutting too close to zero — costs a race that months of training built toward, taper structure isn't something 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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