Race-week taper

The taper is where good fitness is either sharpened or wasted. This recipe makes the assistant ground the taper in your real fitness trajectory and race-week calendar, then hand you a day-by-day outline — without touching your events. For a Claude Project dedicated to race prep, add the race-week Project instruction block so the no-write and timezone rules are always present.

When to use this

• 7-14 days out from a goal event.
• When you are unsure how much to cut and want a TSB target for race morning.
• To sanity-check a taper you have already drafted.

The recipe

I have a [RACE TYPE — e.g. hilly road race, ~3h] on [RACE_DATE]. Plan my
taper. Use icuvisor with my intervals.icu data.

1. Read my athlete profile and resolve any relative dates, countdowns, or
   weekday/date pairings with `resolve_calendar_dates` in my athlete timezone.
2. Read my calendar events around race week to confirm the race and what is
   already scheduled.
3. Pull my fitness trend (CTL / ATL / TSB) and training-load summary for
   the last 6 weeks.
4. Pull my recent activities and my recent wellness.
5. Project where form (TSB) lands on race day under a reduced taper load.

Then give me:
- A day-by-day taper outline from today to race day: load, intensity, and
  the key sharpening sessions.
- The target TSB for race morning, and whether my current trajectory
  reaches it.
- Wellness signals to watch this week.

Rules: do not write or delete calendar events — give me the outline to apply
myself. Do not invent fitness numbers; if the window is short on data, say so.

What icuvisor does

A good answer looks like

Taper to [RACE_DATE] — 8 days out. Current CTL 71, ATL 84, TSB -13 (get_fitness).

Race-morning target: TSB +15 to +20 for a 3-hour race. get_fitness_projection shows that holding ~45% of your recent weekly load this week lands TSB at +17 — on target. Cutting harder risks going flat; cutting less leaves you racing tired.

Day	Session	Load
-8 Sat	Endurance 2h, 2x10min tempo	95
-7 Sun	Easy 1h	35
-6 Mon	Rest	0
-5 Tue	75min, 4x3min at race pace	65
-4 Wed	Easy 45min	28
-3 Thu	50min, 3x90s openers	38
-2 Fri	Rest or 30min spin	0-20
-1 Sat	40min, 3x1min openers	30

Watch this week: resting HR and HRV should drift up as fatigue clears — a drop mid-week means the taper is too light on rest, not too heavy. Sleep is your biggest lever now.

Apply this in intervals.icu yourself — I have not changed any events.

Variations

• Short taper: “…I can only taper for 5 days” — ask for a compressed outline.
• Multi-day event: “…this is a 3-day stage race” — ask for taper plus inter-stage recovery notes.
• Already drafted: paste your taper and ask the assistant to critique it against your fitness trend.

Why this prompt works

• Date-anchored. resolve_calendar_dates prevents stale-chat, UTC, or client-time date math from shifting the taper to the wrong day.
• Projection-anchored. get_fitness_projection turns “rest up” into a specific load percentage that hits a TSB number — testable, not vibes.
• No-write rule. Race week is the worst time for an accidental calendar edit. Explicitly forbidding writes keeps the assistant advisory.
• Wellness watch. Adding the freshness signals to monitor makes the taper adaptive instead of a fixed script.