Mike's Bike Blog

For the month of November my mileage was down. I racked up only 474.41 miles, that's down from my 590 mile average the 3 months prior. On first glance you might be thinking I was slacking, but that's not the case. November I had my biggest and most important event of the year, the Tour das Hugel. Prior to the November 15th ride I did a taper.

If you are not familiar with what a taper is, a taper is a period of rest or reduced training immediately preceding a race. Starting the last week of October I cut back on the mileage and the number of intensity rides. This was my first attempt at tapering, as such it was really hard to get through the mental aspect of not training as much. I would worry if I was loosing too much fitness and how that would impact me during the Hugel.

One of the biggest advantages of training with a Power Meter is being able to see how many watts you expend on a ride. Training Peaks WKO+ software is great for this as it has built in tools to help athletes figure scoring for each ride. I'm not as sophisticated yet, so I look at the average power for a ride. On the PowerTap computer I have the power average to drops zeros, this will give a better average, something a little more accurate to what you would find in Training Peaks for Normalized Power. With this number I can see how hard I worked along with the amount of kJ's I burned in the workout. The more watts equals more kJ's which means a harder workout.

In the end I think it worked out great, I went into the Hugel feeling fresh and my legs didn't have that dead and achy feeling. Next time I will be able to go into my taper with a bit more confidence and won't be skeptical about the benefits and won't be second guessing it.

More Information on Tapering:

• Training: Easy Does It
• Tapering with WKO+
• Active.com - Hit your off-road peak with a well-planned taper
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