You can’t train hard all the way to race day. There comes a point where you aren’t going to make any fitness gains, and doing too much training will result in you having tired legs on race day. Having been there myself, there is nothing worse than getting in to a race and realising you’ve overcooked it with the training beforehand.
On the flipside, you can’t just stop training all together, because then your body starts to ‘shut down’ and you won’t run well at all on race day.
The problems come because each athlete I coach needs a slightly different taper, and unless you’ve tapered before, you aren’t going to know what works best. However, it would be much better to go into the race slightly too tapered than having overdone it.
With the marathon, tapering would usually start three weeks out. As a rough guide, your last long big long run would be 4 weeks from race day, at most 180 minutes (but with some race pace practice in that). Then you would drop down to 120 minutes, 70 minutes (again putting some race pace practice in these runs) and finally race week.
That is the long runs sorted, now what do you do with the rest of your week? Keep the quality in there, but just reduce the volume of work. If we were looking at your threshold intervals, if the biggest session you’d done was 4 x 10 minutes, your sessions might look like.
3 weeks to go – 4 x 8 minutes at threshold
2 weeks to go – 4 x 6 minutes at threshold
Race week – 3 x 4 minutes at threshold
Keep the intensity in there and the routine, but just decrease the amount of work that you are doing.
Do expect to have a few runs or sessions that feel a bit rubbish when tapering. That is perfectly natural. You need to remind yourself that you are doing the right thing and that training hard would be to the detriment of your marathon. During the last three weeks, you aren’t going to improve your marathon fitness, but you can certainly destroy all the hard work you’ve done by training too hard.
Top taper tips
- Keep the routine the same, just reduce the volume of running you are doing
- Don’t try to play catch up with your trainings
- Eat well and stay hydrated – now isn’t the time to diet
- Chillout – use the extra time from not running to relax, not start a home improvement project
- Be prepared – go over all your race preparation so you are organised
