Taper for 1500m freestyle

Impressive swim. Congrats! Care to share how you ultimately decided to taper for the race? I'm not saying this is right. In fact I rarely get the taper right, so I wouldn't advise anyone to follow this. I still don't know if it worked for me. Maybe I could have gone a bit faster if I'd done a longer taper? I'll never know. During the last three months I have suffered fatigue greater than I have ever done before. Probably due to my age. I'm now 70. When I was 55 I followed a similar training regime where I was covering 8-10k metres a day, and 6-7k of this was on butterfly. I was able to keep this up for four months. At the end of it I managed to do 2:37.5 for 200 metres fly. Which, at the time was the fastest in Europe and gave me number 2 in the world, behind American, Robert Poiletman (an amazing swimmer). Since this effort, I haven't been able to compete respectably on butterfly, and now don't even swim it. Purely because I know the kind of work I must put in, and psychologically I can't face doing it again. I really can't. I've always had a real problem 'coming off' a heavy training programme. I have this belief that I'll lose my fitness. My old coach always reminds me of what happened 15 years ago. I was training three times a day, and trying to fit in work as well. One day I couldn't do the mid-day session - I was too busy at work. At the evening's workout the coach asked how I was going. I told him I didn't swim at lunch-time, and that I felt as though I had lost some of my fitness. I hadn't trained 5 hours earlier and I thought my fitness had now suffered. How ridiculous, but I firmly believed it. Nine days before my 1500m swim, I did my biggest set of all, 40 x 200m going every 3:30. It wasn't physically difficult, but it was mind-blowingly boring. That set signalled the end of my training regime. For the next 5 days I dropped back to two sessions a day, putting effort into the morning session and just using the evening session for relaxed swimming. These sessions amounted to 5k metres per day. The following three days were made up of one session a day, covering 2.8k metres per session. All swum at a reasonable pace. I can do the training but it's the taper that beats me every time. I know I need advice and help on this.

Impressive swim. Congrats! Care to share how you ultimately decided to taper for the race? I'm not saying this is right. In fact I rarely get the taper right, so I wouldn't advise anyone to follow this. I still don't know if it worked for me. Maybe I could have gone a bit faster if I'd done a longer taper? I'll never know. During the last three months I have suffered fatigue greater than I have ever done before. Probably due to my age. I'm now 70. When I was 55 I followed a similar training regime where I was covering 8-10k metres a day, and 6-7k of this was on butterfly. I was able to keep this up for four months. At the end of it I managed to do 2:37.5 for 200 metres fly. Which, at the time was the fastest in Europe and gave me number 2 in the world, behind American, Robert Poiletman (an amazing swimmer). Since this effort, I haven't been able to compete respectably on butterfly, and now don't even swim it. Purely because I know the kind of work I must put in, and psychologically I can't face doing it again. I really can't. I've always had a real problem 'coming off' a heavy training programme. I have this belief that I'll lose my fitness. My old coach always reminds me of what happened 15 years ago. I was training three times a day, and trying to fit in work as well. One day I couldn't do the mid-day session - I was too busy at work. At the evening's workout the coach asked how I was going. I told him I didn't swim at lunch-time, and that I felt as though I had lost some of my fitness. I hadn't trained 5 hours earlier and I thought my fitness had now suffered. How ridiculous, but I firmly believed it. Nine days before my 1500m swim, I did my biggest set of all, 40 x 200m going every 3:30. It wasn't physically difficult, but it was mind-blowingly boring. That set signalled the end of my training regime. For the next 5 days I dropped back to two sessions a day, putting effort into the morning session and just using the evening session for relaxed swimming. These sessions amounted to 5k metres per day. The following three days were made up of one session a day, covering 2.8k metres per session. All swum at a reasonable pace. I can do the training but it's the taper that beats me every time. I know I need advice and help on this.