Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of the podcast.

Today is all about tapering.

How to taper for a race or a competition, as well as how to carbohydrate load in preparation for a race or competition,

being a big endurance effort.

Now, I'm in a taper right now for Iron Man, Arizona, which is in three days.

At the time of this recording, it is Thursday, November 13th,

2025. I race this Sunday. I've put in an 18-week prep for Iron Man, Arizona, and it was a big prep.

As I've talked about many times before, my training was anywhere from 19 to 22 hours a week.

Running mileage was between 60 and 65 miles a week.

I topped out at 65 miles a week, and that was two weeks ago, two or three weeks ago. So it was a big effort.

There's a lot of training. And I have found over the years with all the different races and

competitions that I've done that a taper can make a big difference actually. And there's ways to do a taper right.

There's definitely ways to do a taper wrong.

But at the end of the day, a taper, which we're going to get into here,

I'm probably going to say the word taper many, many times starting this episode.

So just be prepared for that. But a taper is very

specific to an individual, but even more so, it is specific to the prep. If you put in a huge block of training

and you've accumulated a lot of volume,

intensity, you're carrying a lot of fatigue,

the taper is going to be more important

and more beneficial

as opposed to if you just put

...