I am only a few weeks away from completing a Base, Build, Speciality program where I will peak for the first week in October.
My Question: is it all possible to hold peak fitness for more than a particular “A” event? If so how long?
I have every intention of going back to SSB1 upon completion, but was interested if this is possible.
Thanks.
There is a blog post written by Coach Timmerman where he suggests going back and repeating weeks 7 and 8, or possibly even 6,7,8.
You can hold it for a couple of weeks before you start seeing declines either from fatigue (if you continue training) or from losing some fitness (if you reduce volume to shed fatigue). Repeating weeks 6-8 or 7&8 will help hold it, but realistically you can’t hope to hold a true peak for more than a couple of weeks.
Although luckily you can race your way through way more than two weeks and the difference between ‘true peak’ and being in a very race-competent state of fitness is actually pretty marginal for us amateurs.
Absolutely. I’ve raced well during SSB and Build, so the difference between that and peak fitness isn’t as big as we all think. The primary difference is fatigue, which can be huge. But once you reduce your volume for a couple of weeks, fitness does start to slide off.