Drop mileage by 25-30%, reduce the volume of speed/interval/tempo work.....blah blah blah.
I have an athlete who, for 3 out of the last 4 seasons, has petered out when we start doing this type of stuff.
the first season (cross of 2011), he runs a massive PR (16:56 at the time) at our league finals meet, while we were still training pretty darn hard. As we started reducing the training for our post season meets, he started running worse and worse. I ascribed this to a long hard season and started backing him off even more. He goes on to run 17:30ish on a state course which is quite a bit faster than our league finals course.
During track of 2012, he ran great races at the end of the season. We kept doing fairly hard workouts right up until the end.
During cross of 2012, once again, he has a great season, running PRs throughout. Comfortably wins league while PR ing. Training stays up for the next meet and he runs great. At our section championship, we began our peaking phase, with the typical reduction of mileage and reduction of speed work. He ran a very flat race and barely grabbed the last qualifying spot to state. We had a two week period until the state meet, so I bumped his mileage back up to the seasons peak, threw in some hard 1 mile tempo intervals on a hilly route, and voila, 2 weeks later he runs a PR and team record for the state meet course.
During this spring, he runs a solid PR of 9:41 for 3200 in late April, but got outkicked by 9 guys on the last lap, after sitting in second with 400 to go in that race. My thinking was, "Well, he doesn't have a lot of speed to begin with and his legs were flat from hard training, so, that explains the lack of kick in that race (last 400 in 70). I thought that as we began to unload a bit, his legs would respond and he would get faster. We backed off the mileage a little bit for our league finals. He ran flat, 4:40 for 1600 and was never a factor in the race, then 10:04 for 3200 and he was feeling pretty tired. The following week at our divisional meet, he ran 9:49, barely taking the last spot to the section masters meet the following week. He looked dead the whole race. After the race, we went back and looked through his training from the previous seasons and saw that when he kept training hard, he ran well. So, I bumped his mileage back to near peak levels for the final week of the season and he responded with a 4 second PR.
For him, one or two slightly easier days prior to a big race is enough to allow for a good performance.
Just thought I'd share....'cuz, you know, we like to talk about running on here.