A, B, C events: how to plan a season around races that matter, races that test, and races for fun

If you've ever signed up for three races in a season and tried to peak for all three, you already know how that ends. You taper for the first, recover from it, ramp back up, taper again — and by race three you're showing up flat, three weeks behind where you should be, asking why your "A-race" pace feels like work.

The fix isn't fewer races. It's deciding, on paper and ahead of time, which races you're peaking for and which ones are doing a different job. That's what the A/B/C tier model is — a way to label each event by the role it plays in your season, so the rest of the plan (taper, recovery, hard sessions) can adapt around it.

The framework comes out of endurance periodization literature — Joe Friel popularized it in The Triathlete's Training Bible, Marc Bañuls walks through a mountain-running version in Correr por Montaña — but the underlying idea is general enough that strength athletes use the same labels for meets and tune-up competitions.

What an A event is

An A event is a race you peak for. There's usually one per season, sometimes two if they're far enough apart. The plan is built around it: the build phase ramps you toward it, the taper unloads you for it, the recovery phase comes after it.

A few signals that something is an A event for you:

• You'd be disappointed if you showed up under-prepared.
• You're willing to drop training stress for 2–3 weeks to peak.
• You're willing to take recovery time after, even if you "feel fine."
• You wouldn't trade it for a workout — finishing it tired and slow is not the goal.

The cost of treating something as an A event is real: you lose 2–3 weeks of training stimulus to the taper, and another 1–2 weeks to recovery. That's why most plans have one A event, not five.

What a B event is

A B event is a race you do within a build phase, without a full taper. You might pull back load for 5–7 days going in, sleep an extra hour, skip a hard interval session — but you're not unloading for three weeks. You finish the race, you take 2–3 easy days, and the build continues.

The job a B event does for you:

• It's a checkpoint. Race-day pace, race-day fueling, race-day pacing decisions — none of it shows up in workouts.
• It's a stimulus. Racing produces an effort you can't fake in training.
• It rehearses the things that go wrong on race day so you find them before the A event does.

The trade-off: you won't run a personal best. You're racing on partly fatigued legs and you're going back to hard training the week after. If the result matters more than the rehearsal, it's not a B event — it's an A event.

What a C event is

A C event is a race you treat as a workout. No taper, no easy week, no rehearsal of race-day routines. You're using the event as a way to do a hard session you couldn't do alone — a fast 5K, a hilly trail effort, a meet where you take attempts you'd never take in the gym.

C events are useful precisely because they're cheap. You can do several of them across a season without disturbing the bigger plan, and they keep you sharp without costing taper weeks. The only rule is honesty about what you're doing: if you secretly wanted a PR, you've turned a C into a failed A, and the plan has to absorb the recovery.

Why labelling them matters

The reason A/B/C is more than vocabulary: it forces a decision before the race that's hard to make after. Once you've shown up and warmed up and looked at the start list, every race feels like an A. Pre-labelling means the plan already knows whether it should taper, train through, or treat the race as Wednesday's interval session — and you don't have to relitigate that choice when adrenaline is high.

It also gives you permission to do more events. A season with one A and three or four Bs and Cs is more interesting than a season with one race you peak for and ten months of empty training around it. The Bs sharpen race execution; the Cs keep training varied; the A still gets the taper it needs because the others didn't steal it.

Putting it together

A simple way to test whether your season makes sense:

1. Pick the A event. One race that the plan revolves around.
2. Pencil in B events as checkpoints in the build phase. They should answer questions you can't answer in training — pacing, fueling, course knowledge.
3. Add C events wherever you'd do a hard workout anyway. Keep them honest: if you wouldn't pay an entry fee for the same effort solo, it's not a C, it's a workout.
4. Look at the calendar. If two events are close enough that you can't recover from one before tapering for the next, one of them is in the wrong tier. Demote, drop, or move.

This is also where most plans go wrong: someone signs up for three "A races" because they all sound important, and then wonders why none of them go well. The honest move is to look at the calendar, pick one, and decide what role each of the others is playing.

When the events feature lands in Peak Health, this is what tier selection will do — let you label the race once, and let the plan handle taper, fueling rehearsal, and recovery from there. Until then, this framework works just as well on paper.

Further reading

The A/B/C tier model didn't start with this post, and the people who wrote about it first are still the cleanest sources:

• Joe Friel, The Triathlete's Training Bible — the canonical English-language treatment, with worked examples for triathletes.
• Marc Bañuls, Correr por Montaña — a Spanish-language adaptation for trail and mountain running, with sharper opinions on how mountain elevation profiles change tier choice.

If you only read one chapter, read either author's section on planning a season backwards from the A event. The rest of their books elaborate; that one chapter is where the model clicks.