The Athlete's Equations · Training
Fitness, fatigue and the taper
lesson 3 of 325 minnot yet done
Banister's model treats every training load as filling two leaky buckets: fitness, which drains slowly (time constant 45 days), and fatigue, which drains fast (15 days) but counts double.
p(t) = Σ w_i [e^{−(t−t_i)/τ_F} − 2 e^{−(t−t_i)/τ_G}]
Performance is fitness minus twice fatigue. Train hard and both rise; stop and fatigue falls first, so performance peaks a couple of weeks after the last hard block. The taper is the art of timing that peak for race day: too long a taper and fitness has faded; too short and fatigue is still in the legs. The Taper game scores your plan against the best.
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