So... what's the plan for this week... (tapering questions)

What should i be doing this week?
How much should volume drop?
Do i work in some intensity or spin recovery only?
Do you normally carb-load for this type of a weekend?

I’m also planning a week of no alcohol and more sleep, but what about coffee? lay off the java?

Everyone’s legs shaved yet? :slight_smile:

WRT coffee, when I used to run my coach’s stance was if you drink it regularly you’ll put yourself off more by not having any than you will help yourself.

This is something I agree with. I don’t feel like racing grumpy.

Same here : can’t go without.

There’s actually a guy (Czeslaw Lukasevitch, i think he was Canadian champion a couple times) who is sponsored by Saeco, the coffee machine company. At races he’d be giving out free espressoes and i saw him drink 3 right before a race once!

As for the rest, i’m gonna do a relatively hard work-out tomorrow for about 1.30- 2 hours, with high intensity anearobic intervals. And on wednesday i’m just gonna do low resistance high cadence for 1:30; a good aerobic exercise. And that should be it till saturday!

some guidelines:
the week before competition, you cut in volume and you keep the same amount of intensity for the workouts (do your intervals with less recovery time between them and cut in the longer mild-intensity workouts).
From Michel Delore’s “Le cyclosportif” (a good reference book): starting 4 days before competition, training rides should not be more than 1/2 (in kilometers) of what they usually are.

Lots of rest is a good thing: remember that it’s the sleep you had a couple of days (2-3) before the race that really matter, and not the night just before (they’ve done study on 1-night sleep deprived athletes vs “had a good night of rest” athletes and there was no significant difference in performance"

For the coffee, I agree with John: don’t change your routine 5 days before the race. If you want to decrease your coffee intake, start after Rutgers and do it over a longer period.

Finally, for nutrition, the principle of glycogen loading is to build “above normal” reserves of glycogen. As describes Arnie Baker in his book “Bicycling medicine”, it’s a 2-phase process:

  1. glycogen use or exhaustion with heavy exercise followed by
  2. reduced activity accompanied by a high carbohydrate diet

If you do intense workouts tomorrow and Wednesday (or Tuesday+Wednesday) and take it easy with pasta/rice/potato,etc-based meals on Wednesday night + Thursday + Friday before taking the bus, this should be optimized.