The tapering issue.  The simplicity of the concept of tapering is, many times, complicated by the notion of our endurance-defined activities.  Think about it.  The basic route to success at our sport is the repetitive and increased duration of each activity to enhance one’s ability to go faster for long periods of time.  We all know that we should incorporate some recovery in order to benefit from this work, but being the type A, heart rate monitoring, anaerobic loving, long distance thriving paddle geeks we are, it goes against our nature.

During the taper your focus is on RECOVERY!  When in doubt, either shorten or go easier on a given workout . . . or eliminate it altogether!  The point is to keep things moving while getting rested.  Remember that fatigue usually trails training by 2 to 5-days.  If, when you first back off, you feel worse (more tired), don’t panic!  Go with it and keep things at a very low intensity and cut the duration of your workouts.  Better yet, when faced with this situation, take an additional day or two OFF!

Yes, we know this goes against the serious paddlers credo of “harder, longer, more tired” but the state of being truly rested prior to a competition has become such a foreign feeling for most athletes come the middle of the season that it’s difficult to remember what it feels like.  Many SUP athletes are so accustomed to being tired that they don’t feel right unless there’s a constant veil of fatigue under which they operate on a day-to-day basis.  Do you remember what it’s like to go up a flight of stairs without your legs throbbing with the burn of recent workouts?   Do you remember what it’s like to be able to push with no burn in your back and arms?  Labored breathing, yes, absolutely, but none of that loaded up, burning in your shoulders so  common to the over-trained stand up paddler?

You don’t remember, do you?  Maybe you’ve never felt that good.  Maybe you’ve never been truly rested – except that time when you were sick and couldn’t train for two weeks before the biggest workout (or race for your racers out there) of your season and then, boom, right when you thought you’d have the worst race/workout  of your life, you got a personal best. It was a miracle.  It made no sense but it gave you the motivation to train even harder and you haven’t been close to that time since.  Hmmmm.

Ok, here’s the deal:  The length of a taper is dependent on the amount of work you’ve done going into the taper, the importance of the event, and how much fatigue you’ve accumulated.  Generally speaking, the more training you’ve done, the bigger the base of fatigue and the longer you’ll need to taper to get the peak you’re looking for.  Also, if the race in question is of great importance, you’ll want to be maximally rested and are not going to “train through” it.

So, how much of a taper is enough?  Well this is a very individual question but we suggest you consider a 5 to 7-day taper for an important short distance event.  During this period you should consider one to two days completely off but the remainder of your week should stick pretty closely to your typical weekly training pattern.  In other words, you can maintain the frequency of your workouts but you need to cut the duration by as much as 50%.  You can keep the intensity of the harder sessions high but decrease the length of the intervals and increase the recovery.  You can still do some harder/faster training but keep the efforts short and make sure you’re getting fully recovered so that you don’t incur any long-term cost from the efforts.  This is known as not leaving your race in training.  Remember the goal is to have the energy necessary to give a maximal effort for the big “workout” on the weekend – your goal race.

Roch and Huddle