Races and events: priorities, tapering and periodization

A, B and C events

Event priority determines how the AI structures your training:

• A Events — your most important goals, where you want peak fitness. Pick 1–2 per year, at least 12 weeks apart. The AI builds a full periodization plan (Base → Build → Peak → Taper → Race) with a 3-week taper.

• B Events — important races where you want to perform well but not necessarily peak. Great for testing tactics, nutrition, and pacing. You get a 1-week mini-taper with reduced volume plus opener workouts the day before.

• C Events — practice/fun races you train through; they hold similar value to a key hard workout. No taper. The AI removes the scheduled workout that day but treats the event itself as training.

Which priority should I pick?

The priority is not how much a race matters to you personally. It is an instruction about your training: it tells the coach how much to back off beforehand.

A useful test: am I willing to arrive slightly less trained in order to arrive fresh?

• Yes, completely. That is an A race, and you want one or two a year.
• Yes, a little. That is a B race: a short taper and openers the day before.
• No, I want to keep training through it. That is a C race: no taper, and the race counts as your hard session for that day.

If you race often, most of your races are C races. This is the most common mistake we see. Every B race tapers its week, so a B race every week or two leaves the plan permanently tapering and your weekly load can fall to around half of what you were training. If you race most weekends, mark the ones you run through as C and keep B for the few you genuinely want to be sharp for.

Club races, parkruns, company runs, series races and hard group rides are almost always C.

Multiple goals

Add multiple events in Intervals.icu marked A/B/C. The AI considers all of them when planning phases and tapers.

An event I didn’t create appeared

IntervalCoach reads your goals straight from your Intervals.icu calendar, so any event there is treated as a real goal. If another platform writes events into the same calendar, IntervalCoach plans around them too. Athletica, for example, can create a synthetic A-priority race (such as “Train to Maintain”) with a real date even when you only asked it to build general fitness, and once that lands in Intervals.icu, IntervalCoach builds a full Peak/Taper/Race block around it.

If you ever see a taper or race structure you did not ask for, check your Intervals.icu calendar for an event you did not add. Delete it, or drop it to C priority, then regenerate your plan and the structure relaxes.

Multi-day events (stage races, tours)

Detected automatically two ways: a single calendar event spanning multiple days, or consecutive same-name events (e.g. "Tour de Wallonie - Stage 1/2"). Once detected, Race Week extends across the whole event, taper timing is based on the first stage, CTL targets are raised 15–25% for cumulative fatigue, and the post-event email arrives after the last stage.

Tapering

A events get a full 3-week taper (volume down, intensity maintained) for peak freshness. B events get a 1-week mini-taper plus openers. C events get no taper. For multi-day events the taper happens before the first stage and the plan stays in Race Week throughout.

Periodization

The AI structures training in phases based on time to your goal — early phases build aerobic base, middle phases add intensity and specificity, final phases sharpen before tapering. Training-goal templates use goal-specific phase models.

Cycling disciplines (road, MTB, gravel)

Currently IntervalCoach treats all cycling as a single sport type — workouts aren't optimized specifically for MTB or gravel. When you set a goal event, the AI analyzes the event type (endurance, racing, gran fondo, etc.) to adjust target fitness.