Your Endurance Lifestyle. Redesigned.

Here’s a simple exercise. Add up all the hours you trained in your biggest week and then divide that by the total number of hours in the entire week (168). The results should be humbling. Even a massive 24 hours of training in a single week is only 14.2% of that week. In other words, you spend 85% of your time doing stuff other than exercise.

Improving your efficiency as a swimmer is one of the hardest parts of being a triathlete. Not because swimming is that incredibly hard, but because proper swimming is a skill-oriented exercise. All the fitness in the world won’t help you if only 5% of that strength is contributing to your forward motion in the water.

As the early big races of the season are approaching, it’s time to once again consider perhaps the hardest part of your training: the taper. While almost every triathlete has heard of tapering, very few actually get it right. This article has two goals: to help you understand your personal needs and cues for tapering based on your event, and to give you active steps you can take to implement your taper.