It is said that you can ride in a day what you typically ride in a week. I find this to be true. If you're regularly doing 200km weeks, an imperial century will be fine physically. It's tougher mentally, because after around 80 miles there always seems to be a part of the brain that says, "Why are we doing this? We could literally be doing anything else."
I don't "taper" or anything like. I've blissfully not done an imperial century in about 6 months, but the last one was preceded by back-to-back metric centuries. 63 on Tuesday, 64 on Wednesday, 25 on Thursday, 102 on Saturday. Normal.
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