This story is sponsored by WHOOP. WHOOP is a personalized fitness wearable that provides you with coaching insights on your recovery, daily activity, and sleep. Go to WHOOP.com to learn more or sign up now at join.whoop.com/flosports and get your first month free from us.

Big races come in different forms--from a championship cross country meet in the fall, to a marathon that you’ve had your eye on for years. The training, preparation, planning all culminate in your best effort when it matters the most. 

But peaking correctly is sometimes a moving target and managing your final set of workouts can be difficult. With WHOOP, you can have a better understanding of when it’s time to peak for a race and how to make sure you get the most out of yourself on race day. 

WHOOP’s color-coded recovery system (red, yellow, green) allows you to easily track how your body is adapting to workouts in preparation for a key race. Each morning, you have a score from 0 to 100% that indicates your level of recovery. Green means you are ready to go, while red tells you it’s time to focus on rest. WHOOP helps manage both your training and your recovery in pursuit of the ideal peak that has you on the starting line feeling rested, fresh and ready to chase your goals.

The more you wear WHOOP, the more data you get about how your body responds to different training cycles. But it also goes deeper. WHOOP also allows you to track other behaviors that impact performance like travel, alcohol consumption, caffeine and meditation. Armed with this information, you can start to see what gets you to be at your best, and what is holding you back. From this data, you’ll receive personalized weekly, monthly and yearly performance assessments that will help you make adjustments based on past training cycles and help unlock the perfect peak plan for you.

“To constantly see clear metrics on my phone and to see, ‘Hey, you're 97% recovered.’ Your strain is this much. And I actually have a coach on my phone telling me, ‘go for it.’ That was just this whole 'nother level that I was able to reach because of WHOOP,” said Sam Parsons, a professional distance runner for Tinman Elite.

WHOOP calculates Recovery using four key metrics: Resting heart rate, heart rate variability (HRV), sleep and strain. Together, they paint a picture about how you are managing your build-up and taper. Positive trends in the data that show you’re ready to peak include:

-Lowered resting heart rate 

-Increased HRV

-Less sleep needed to adequately recover

-Your workouts/recovery runs accumulate less strain than they did before (you are able to push the pace/intensity more without accumulating more strain than usual)

With those markers pointed in the right direction, you can approach your next race with the confidence that you will be at your best on the race day. Drew Hunter, also of Tinman Elite, is familiar with that feeling. 

“When you can wake up and see you're in the green and know that you've done the months of hard work and hard miles, then it's the perfect spot to be.”

To join WHOOP and get your first month free, go to join.whoop.com/flosports