Race Week Protocol

The taper is where fitness you already own gets revealed — it cannot create fitness, only unmask it, and the most common taper mistake is doing too much, the second most common is doing too little of the right thing.

The principle coaches converge on: cut volume hard, keep intensity. Strength and speed are slow to lose, so the long base work can be trimmed early and aggressively; endurance and race-sharpness fade faster and must be touched right up to race week¹. A concrete, battle-tested protocol from Birkie coaching: with a solid base behind you, add sharpening intervals four to six weeks out, then cut total training volume by roughly half — on the order of 40 to 60 percent — over the final two weeks while keeping short, race-pace touches so the body stays fast². You will feel restless and slightly guilty. That feeling is the taper working.

Many monuments require travel, sometimes to altitude, and both deserve planning.

Arrive early enough to be a person again before you're an athlete — a red-eye and a hard next-day effort is a recipe for a flat race. If the race sits at altitude, know that the honest options are narrow: real acclimatization takes weeks, and the best-supported model is to live high and train low so you gain the blood adaptation without losing training speed³ — a plan for skiers who can spend weeks in the mountains, not a race-week fix. For everyone else, arriving either a couple of days before (racing before the worst of the altitude hit lands) or accepting a modestly slower race is more honest than any supplement. Don't try anything new with altitude on race week.

Wax is where classic skiers earn or lose their race before the gun, and where our brand's color language comes from. Grip wax is chosen by snow temperature: harder waxes for cold, fresh snow; softer waxes and eventually klister for warm, transformed, or icy snow, applied in thin layers and corked smooth⁴. The color bands you see across this site — green, blue, violet, red — are the actual temperature bands of the kick-wax system, from very cold to near-freezing.

You do not need to be a wax technician. You need a rule of thumb, the forecast, and the humility to test on the morning's snow: cold and fresh means a hard wax; near freezing and transformed means klister and clean hands afterward, never; in between, a mid-range wax and a short test-ski to confirm grip. Waxless skis skip this entirely and give up a little glide for total simplicity — the right trade for many skiers on many days.