Hi, this is Debbie Voils. Coach at Mojo for Running with episode number 152. How to Taper for

your goal races and what it can do for your race performance. Now let's talk about tapers. Some people hate them, at least until race day. Then everyone who did it right

always thinks the tapers are magical, and they would be right. And they always taper after that because

they find out what a great payoff tapering has.

Did you watch the athletes in the Olympics breaking records, even records that they themselves had

set? Did you wonder how they managed to have a breakout race at the perfect time at the Olympics,

the most important race of their lives? That's the beauty of a good taper. It allows

you to control when you have your best performances. We'd like to have an outstanding performance

every time out, but that's not possible. But with an effective use of periodization, we can

manipulate our ability to perform, landing it on the date of our goal race.

Even an athlete at the top tier, one who's been racing for years, who set personal best

hundreds of times, still manages to keep doing it and to do it on the single most important

occasion. This doesn't happen by chance.

Tapering on top of an effective race schedule, I mean race cycle, is the secret. In the last

episode, I mentioned periodization, training in cycles to give the body time to recover before

bringing on new stress, often greater stress than ever before.

But after an appropriate recovery phase and a gradual buildup, this is possible because of that recovery, of this total recovery.

As a result of the last intense cycle and recovery from that cycle, the athlete's body should be ready to perform

at an even higher level than in that last goal race. Now, there's much that goes into any race,

and the longer the race, as we all know, all too well, the more there is that can go wrong.

But at the elite level, they control for everything,

right? From nutrition to massages, to acupuncture, to biohacking, sleep, and it works. Arguably,

...