Chinook is now less than a week away and with a newly acquired membership into the 300 Club I’m ready to start the specific leadup towards the race this coming Saturday. When updating my training log I did a little fiddling around to display what the plans laid out for the coming week are likely to do to me fitness wise.

The first figure of note is what would be likely to happen if I were to sit on my butt all week long and rest in anticipation of the race in 6 days.

I would be pretty much guaranteed to drain all of the fatigue out of my body in time for the race, and I would be relying on my previously earned fitness to not disappear before race-day. Besides the fact that I might find myself a bit unfamiliar with the feeling of efficient swimming, cycling or running I would probably perform alright, my form would have crept up above my chronic training stress in time for race day, not by a ton, but relatively significantly, and I would be operating on a training stress level as low as I had during the height of my obligations with organization of the Spring Thaw Triathlon. To compare, the alternative to rest, I’ll pretend that I did this coming week the same thing that I did last week. I’d be building some serious fitness, and piling on the acute stress (fatigue, aches in muscles, need for sleep, etc.)

In short, the result of more hard training would be an improvement in long term fitness. In that case however, one week from now I’d be even more haggard than I am today. Not great news if I wanted to race well, so there’s a tapering protocol employed designed to let the acute stress drop off without having me rest up too much in anticipation of more hard training to be done the week after the race. All this resting is not good training in the long run, so you’re spending a bit of your potential fitness, in exchange for a good race result. Instead of trying to keep building up the chronic training curve (red) we put it on pause and hold it level this week, rather than rest too much and let it fall. The result of the plan is to try and trace this curve up until race morning:

At which point I race, incur some serious training effect, and by the end of Saturday the charts should look kinda like this: