I can remember it like it was yesterday. My first marathon. It was as if I was determined to pack as many errors into one painful learning experience. I can vividly picture those feelings I had when I lined up on the start line. No, not just the nerves but my shattered legs from the 15-mile practice run two days earlier. Something needed to change.
How to taper for your goal race?
- Finish your second heaviest training block three weeks out from your goal race.
- In the first taper week cut your mileage by 15% to 20% from the prior week.
- In the second taper week cut your mileage by a further 25% to 30% to the level of what is a normal recovery week.
- In the final taper week cut mileage by a further 20%. Include a speed session.
- Maintain nutrition and sleep volume through the taper period.
What I have learned over the years from doing the classic three-week taper is that the same basic formula works for me no matter what the distance of my goal race is. That is because I base my taper on my training volume immediately prior to starting my taper.
My training plan for a half is very different from an ultra. Therefore the actual run volume during my taper will look different at first glance, but on closer inspection follows an almost identical formula. Let’s unpack all of that in more detail so that you don’t have to make the same painful mistakes that I did.
Why Bother To Taper At All?
As you round out what is typically the second heaviest training block of your entire training plan you will have a lot of accumulated metabolic fatigue. More than likely this will be accompanied by a fair amount of muscle stiffness and soreness.
If you had to stop suddenly three days before your race as many tend to do there is a very high probability that your body will lock up in stiffness that will make racing anywhere near your potential impossible. A well-executed taper can mean as much as a 5% performance increase.
I remember the days when tapering for a goal race wasn’t anywhere near where it is today. In order to tank-up our nutrition for race day, we would stuff ourselves to the gills the night before. Getting up with that jaded feeling from not being able to sleep as a direct result of overeating.
All around me on the start line would be similarly distended bellies, none of us willing to risk more than the tiniest sips of water for our parched throats.
Since learning how to taper a race day morning has become a far more enjoyable experience. Now, if I can figure out how to be less cranky from the lack of running-induced endorphins during my taper then my family will be a lot happier too.
Three Weeks Before Your Goal Race
The objective of the first week of your taper is to cut your mileage by 15% to 20%. This is actually not that difficult to do at all. It is what I like to call my “half-recovery” week. The reason for this is that the way I structure my training blocks is making my recovery weeks a 40% to 50% reduction in my run volume.
The way I do this is by reducing the miles of my long run by 10% and by cutting most of the remaining miles from the light, easy recovery runs that I do between my key, intensity workouts during the week.
When it comes to my key intensity workouts I will usually cut one repetition from each set of intervals. For instance, if I am doing sprints on a steep hill a normal workout would be five sets of five sprints per set. I will adjust the workout to be five sets of four sprints per set. The important factor is that I still maintain the same intensity for each and every sprint that I do.
There is no need to do any extra special workouts during your taper period. The workouts in your training plan have been tailored to the distance of your goal race. As your energy levels increase during your taper the temptation will be right there to do something different in one of your training sessions.
All this will be is showing off to yourself how strong and fit you are. This self-induced ego stroking will likely put your months of hard work in jeopardy.
It reminds me of something that I remember former Ironman World Champion, Sebastian Kienle, said about the Canadian athlete Lionel Sanders. Kienle said that Sanders had the reputation of putting in his best athletic performances of the year on the treadmill, particularly during what ought to be a pre-race taper.
The interesting part about this first week of your taper is that you are still doing all of your workouts, just shaving away a little of the mileages. Although it may not feel that significant, you will still gain the benefit of reducing your fatigue levels.
Two Weeks Before Your Goal Race
During your second taper week, you will reduce your total run volume by an additional 25% to 30%. In other words, you will be working as hard as you normally would during one of your normal recovery weeks.
The difference being that a normal recovery week comes after the biggest week of your training block. In this instance, it is coming after a week where you already have reduced run mileage.
The way that I go about this in a practical sense is by reducing my long run down to the same as what I normally do for a midweek recovery run. Then I take my key intensity workouts and reduce them by as much as 70%. My normal midweek recovery runs would stay largely unchanged, though perhaps a mile or two less to compensate for a slower pace.
The reason for cutting back my long run so drastically is that with less than two weeks till race day there are virtually no endurance gains that I could still get. On the other hand, the extra fatigue that I would get from “just one more” long run may very well carry over till race day.
One thing that I will admit is that I tend to get very cranky after missing my long run at the end of the second week of my taper. It is in my nature to be a little bit of a creature of habit. And my long run has been my form of therapy for years. Taking that away suddenly leaves a bit of a hole in my week.
One last thing that I must add about week-two of the taper is that you still have a full complement of training days, just reduced mileage in total. Don’t start taking extra rest days so that you can make up for it by still having your beloved long run.
Race Week
In most instances, race week takes on a very different format to any other week of training. After the first two weeks of your taper, you should start feeling an increase in your energy levels.
What you now need to do with all of that extra energy that you feel is to take an extra rest day, or maybe even two rest days during race week.
Under normal circumstances, this extra downtime can be super frustrating. This is where making your goal race a destination race is so useful. That way one of your extra rest days can be occupied as a travel day.
That leads me to the next important part of race week. That is planning. By planning I don’t mean that now is when you start planning your hydration or fueling strategy for your goal race. That should have been done already. What I am talking about is making a plan for something to do to keep your mind occupied during all of this extra downtime during race week.
Having planned for your race week downtime will make a huge positive impact on your pre-race nerves and will make you a more pleasant person to be around.
Being in the inner circle of a stressed-out athlete during race week is no fun at all.
If your goal race is a 100-mile ultra-trail race you certainly do not want to alienate your crew and pacers just days before your big day.
What I always do is build a short speedwork session into one of my runs during the week. I will usually do that on the day after my travel day as it helps to ease any stiffness from sitting in a cramped position for hours.
Something else that I also do daily during race week is I take five or ten minutes each day and do a couple of run drills. Also, if I have had an injury over the preceding four to six months I will also do the rehab strengthening exercises that my physio gave me.
I have no idea whether there are any physical benefits of doing this, but it gives me the peace of mind that everything is ok and I am not about to get re-injured. This is important, especially as I have a tendency toward injury paranoia during race week.
Finally, I will always and I mean always go for a very light, easy run of between one and three miles the day before the event. If I am at the race venue and if it is permitted I will try to make that last run be near or through what will be the finish area of the race.
Sleep And Nutrition
As much as is possible, keep to your same sleep and nutrition patterns during the three weeks of your taper. Now is not the time to bring in something new.
We all know that the night before a big goal race our nerves and excitement will likely keep us out of sleep. So, if you have kept to the same sleep patterns all through your taper the one disrupted night will have way less of a negative impact.
In fact, my own experience is that I find that the fatigue from a disrupted night hits me 48 hours later. For that reason what does or does not happen the night before a race is of little consequence. Then again I haven’t done any events that require multiple nights out on the trail like the Moab 240 or Barkley Marathons.
When it comes to nutrition and tapering for a goal race, things have changed a lot over the decades since I started running and doing endurance sport.
I can remember those nights of eating bowl after bowl of pasta in the hopes of somehow pushing more glycogen into my muscles for the race the next morning. What I succeeded in doing was having a very uncomfortable night trying to sleep with a belly stretched to its virtual bursting point.
For me, race mornings after extreme carbo-loading were fraught with various gastrointestinal issues. I can remember at least three races in hot weather where I got dehydrated because I couldn’t drink any water for the first hour of the race because my gut was feeling so stuffed full of undigested pasta.
My tipping point, if you pardon the pun, relating to carbo-loading with huge bowls of pasta came after a group of four of us went out to a pasta restaurant together the night before a marathon. My pasta had a cream-based sauce. I suspect the cream in the sauce was not quite as fresh as it should have been.
My night was a horror of food poisoning and I couldn’t hold down any nutrition for the whole marathon. I think it was at mile 15 when I could start taking small sips of water. Since then I avoid cream-based pasta sauces when at all possible and no longer stuff myself full of pasta the night before a race.
The good news is that I no longer need to. By maintaining my same nutrition plan while reducing my training volume over the three weeks of my taper I can arrive at the start line with full glycogen reserves and be well-rested too.
