bing181 said:.... I've read that there's not much benefit to training from about 14 days before an event, but doing a recovery week followed by a 2 week wind-down/taper doesn't feel right. Any suggestions?...
It depends a lot on your base fitness and how much of that you're willing to trade for freshness during your event. A lot of the tapering advice out there applies to riders with a lot of base getting ready for a key event. But any time you taper you sacrifice some of your accumulated training base in order to be as fresh as possible. If your base isn't all that high then you really shouldn't give too much of it away.
I've been using the Performance Manager in WKO+ along with power meter data to track CTL/ATL and TSB for the last year and it really illustrates the concept of building and then sacrificing some base during a taper. From that standpoint I wouldn't bother with much beyond a minitaper unless your CTL is 90-100 or above. With your description of a 2x20 day, a tempo day and a longer hilly ride on Sunday, it sounds like you're probably below that threshold. IOW if you're doing 8 - 10 hours a week with L4/L3 and L3/SST and you've been doing that since midwinter or so I'd bet your CTL is 70 or below. I wouldn't do much more than a minitaper starting from that base.
My minitapers consists of training at the same or even a touch higher intensities but dropping the duration by 20-30 percent. So I'd do maybe 2x15 on your L4 day, cut the length of your tempo ride by 20% or so and do the same for your weekend ride. I'd also plan to have one or more days off leading up to your event, but never the day before the event. So I'd reschedule as necessary to rest two and possibly three days before your event but get out the day before and ride for an hour or so at a fairly mellow pace but throw in a few short L4 or tempo efforts and maybe a good hard minute to really wake your muscles up.
I'd agree you can't start from scratch and expect to build much fitness in the 14 days leading up to an event, but you can build a bit or at least maintain what you have. If you start a full two week taper on a modest base you'll be real fresh but going backwards on overall fitness.
Good luck and let us know how it goes,
Dave
