Race Week Is Where People Unravel.

I have never lost an athlete's race in a training block. I have watched several get lost in the seven days before one.

The pattern is always the same. The volume drops, the legs feel strange, the athlete interprets strange as unfit, and they go and do something to reassure themselves. That something is always the thing that costs them.

You cannot get fitter in race week. You can absolutely get slower.

Why You Feel Terrible

This is the part nobody warns people about, and it causes most of the damage.

When training load drops sharply, your body does not immediately feel fresh. For the first few days it often feels worse. Heavy legs, poor sleep, a sluggish easy run, a swim where nothing works. Athletes read this as evidence that the taper is going wrong.

It is going right. You have spent weeks suppressing your body's repair processes with continuous load, and when you release that, a lot of repair happens at once. That feels like fatigue because in a sense it is, but it is the productive kind.

The freshness usually arrives late, in the last two or three days. Athletes who panic on Wednesday and go and do a hard session never get to Saturday's version of themselves.

What Actually Comes Down

Volume, substantially. Somewhere between forty and sixty percent over the week, depending on the distance and the athlete.

Intensity, hardly at all. This is the bit people get backwards. They cut the hard stuff and keep plodding through easy volume, which is exactly the wrong way round. You keep short, sharp efforts in, at race pace or slightly above, in small doses. A few hundreds at race pace in the pool, some short efforts on the bike, a handful of strides.

Those efforts do not build fitness. They keep the neuromuscular system switched on, and without them athletes arrive flat and find that race pace feels foreign.

Frequency stays the same. Do not take three days off. Touch every discipline, briefly, so nothing feels unfamiliar on the day.

The Things People Do That Cost Them

A last long session to prove fitness. Never once helped anybody. The work is done, and a four hour ride on Wednesday is a withdrawal from an account you need on Saturday.

A new bike fit, new shoes, new saddle, new nutrition. Race week is the single worst time to change anything, and the urge to optimise gets strongest exactly when it should be resisted.

A sudden carbohydrate obsession that starts on Friday afternoon. Fuelling for a race is a two to three day process at ordinary meal times, not one enormous plate of pasta the night before.

And a complete change in sleep pattern in pursuit of extra rest. Going to bed three hours early on Friday because you are anxious tends to produce a night of lying awake. The night that matters most is Thursday, because almost nobody sleeps well the night before a race and you should plan for that rather than fight it.

What I Actually Ask For

Keep your normal week's shape and shrink it. Same days, same disciplines, much shorter, with a small amount of race pace in each.

Do the transition rehearsal once, early in the week, not the night before.

Read the race brief properly, on Monday, when you can still solve a problem. Half the race morning stress I see comes from discovering a rule or a road closure at seven in the morning.

Get your kit out on Thursday, laid out, complete. Not Friday night at eleven.

And keep the rest of your week ordinary. Athletes who take Friday off work and spend it thinking about the race arrive at the start line having already run it forty times in their head. A normal Friday is better preparation than a dedicated one.

The Nerves Are Not a Problem

Elevated heart rate, poor appetite, broken sleep, needing the toilet repeatedly. That is a nervous system preparing for something hard, and it is appropriate.

Trying to make it go away tends to make it worse. What helps is having somewhere for it to go: a long exhale, four in and six or eight out, for a few minutes at a time. Not to feel calm, but to keep the arousal at a level you can use.

The Bottom Line

Cut volume hard, keep a little intensity, keep the frequency. Change nothing. Expect to feel worse before you feel better, and expect the good legs to arrive late.

The work is already done. Race week is about arriving with it intact.