One year ago this two weeks- Mt Evans and Leadman taper.

 4 weeks before Leadman and you can see where the focus was. Red pen indicates quality sessions so I had 6 days of hard sessions.
Monday- Bike with 2 X 3 mile/ 1000ft climbs at Tempo efforts. If I remember correctly I was seeing 260-270 watts. I remember being disappointed. Pretty weak considering I've ridden 120 miles in workouts at  260 normalized power.

Tuesday- Bacon Strip. 10 miles with 1800ft of climbing in 1:12 (7:12 pace). Speed was starting to come easy.

Wednesday- Long ride with 8000ft of climbing

Thursday- 20 miles with 4400ft of climbing averaging 7:37 pace. This run indicated to me what I could do at the Leadville Marathon.

Friday- Easy bike

Saturday- Run w/ 10 X 1:15 hill intervals on 45" rest

Sunday- Run w/ 3 mile climb at threshold

Total: 16 hours with 28000ft of climbing. 53 miles running with 10,600ft of vertical but I averaged 7:38 pace all above 8000ft altitude. The speed of my volume was really starting to come. I sort of panicked this week concerned that I hadn't biked enough and I gave in to that and didn't trust my training plan. Common thing to do for many of us. As a coach I preach the discipline of not doing this and it cost me a much faster time at Mt Evans the next week.

 Start 3 week taper for Leadman. This was a fairly sharp drop in volume and quality. On Tuesday I did a 2.6 mile hill climb at Threshold which was specific to Mt Evans on Saturday. Mt Evans would be my first running race in a YEAR (my last running race was Mt Evans the previous year) and I was crazy nervous which caused me to cramp while standing on the start line. Then I cramped from mile ~7 to the finish. I was super happy though. I placed second and the third place guy went on to win the Leadville marathon 2 weeks later.

 I felt that the Leadville marathon and then the 50 mile bike were intense enough to warrant true tapers. The 100 bike and the 100 run did not. It comes down to pointy end speed/ intensity. For a 100 mile race the effort is moderate enough that 'peaking' is not needed. For the 100's you just gotta be super rested. And you can't peak for all the races so I had to choose. The previous year I had focused solely on the 50 and 100 bike and trained like a cyclist so I rode much better then. This year I had focused on running and put very little stock in to the bike races and hoped to just coast on the previous year's cycling fitness and it worked. I ran very well and my bike was just adequate. I suspected that for Leadman the bike didn't matter and the only goal should be to not lose too much time to my competitors. I guessed correctly.