London Duathlon In Richmond Park – 3 and a bit weeks to go – GO FASTER INTELLIGENTLY

It’s getting VERY close – Sunday 9th September 2012 for the London Duathlon in Richmond Park.

Hopefully you’ve really been “going for it” over the last couple of weeks whilst at the same time remembering that your body needs to recover between sessions. Hopefully too you’ve mixed it up a little and varied your sessions.

Now is the time to start thinking about the run up to the race. You’ve got a little time left to tweak your performance but soon you will be coming up to the taper period. If you do that wrong then all of your good work will be wasted. The hard part is to scale down your efforts whilst tapering with the excitement of the race looming.

I hope you’ve not forgotten that Richmond Park is UNDULATING, so you should do some hill work. If you had forgotten that then maybe this weekend you should do a HILL BRICK SESSION with lots of race paced efforts.

Remember 30th August – After this date your training will not increase your ability to go faster AT ALL, not one second (sort of!). Ensure you taper correctly after this. I’ll come back to that soon.

We’ve already passed 10th August – this was your peak training day. All the training you are doing from NOW until 30th August will start to have less and less of a bearing on how you will perform on the day. Diminishing returns…Keep doing it and make it real quality.

After 30th August your fitness WILL AND SHOULD start to decline slightly during your taper. However that WILL be counteracted by your fatigue levels falling rapidly. the net balance is that your capacity to race faster increases to race day. That’s a taper. So all you need to do when tapering is to get some (sub-) race paced efforts going for relatively short periods (90secs) have some compete rest for, say, 3 minutes and do it again. That’s the gist of it. That stops your ‘fitness’ from falling too much. There’s more detail elsewhere on this blog (search for taper probably) but as I say I’ll come back to a taper for the London Duathlon in a few weeks. I’ll even let you know what I’m doing for mine as I think I might be making an unexpected (for me) appearance.

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Last Updated on 13 December 2025 by the5krunner

the5krunner

tfk is the founder and author of the5krunner, an independent endurance sports technology publication. With 20 years of hands-on testing of GPS watches and wearables, and competing in triathlons at an international age-group level, tfk provides in-depth expert analysis of fitness technology for serious athletes and endurance sport competitors. ID