![]() ![]() “Let’s say you’re scheduled to go six miles at 7:00 pace,” says Thom Hunt, a former American 10K red-holder who now coaches at Cuyamaca College in San Diego. In the ideal taper, you run as many days a week as you normally do (maybe with one or two extra, judiciously timed, rest days), but reduce volume in everything from workouts to long runs, as well as your weekly total mileage. It works best by cutting down progressively, not all at once.īosquet’s paper found that the ideal taper eventually cut down total volume by 40-60 percent by the final week, including speed workouts. What you don’t need is to push any of these to the max. This means a mix of everything from strides to aerobic work. You need to do some speedwork during the taper in order to keep all your energy and neuromuscular systems sharp. The ideal taper comes from reducing volume, but not intensity. It’s too late to try to make up for lost training earlier in your training cycle, and if you try to do that, all you can do is to blow your taper…and with it, your race. The hay is in the barn and your goal is to rest, while not letting your “training” hay go moldy. In the final days, extra training won’t help. You shouldn’t expect to get that much, but trust that proper tapering will result in a better time. Note, however, that 5.6 percent benefit is an extreme case. That’s the difference between a 3:20 marathon and a 3:31 marathon. Tapering works.Ī 2007 study led by Laurent Bosquet, then at the University of Montreal, Canada, found that a taper can speed you up by more than 5.6 percent. Luckily, there are a few basic principles you can remember when the fears we all face about being lazy or missing training tempt you to do too much. It’s a mistake that can make the difference between a PR and a disappointment. Going stale occasionally happens, but most runners err in the opposite direction by not trusting the marathon taper process, trying to do too much when they should be resting. A big piece of success lies in the final stages of preparation where you execute the marathon taper, a stage of training when you back off and try to walk the tightrope between going into the race well-rested, but not so rested that you go stale. Fall marathons are looming, and tens of thousands of runners are finally preparing to toe the line to see just what they can do after all these months of waiting. ![]()
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