How to Taper for the Marathon

Audio Transcript

Coach Sinead: Hi everyone, I am here with you for today’s episode of Extra Kick brought to you by Runners Connect.

Thank you so much for joining me today. If you have a question you’d like one of our expert coaches to answer in an upcoming episode, you can submit it at runnersconnect.net/daily.

You can ask us absolutely anything at all to do with nutrition, training, racing, whatever has you curious, and we will be more than happy to help. Please do submit those.

Today we have a fantastic question from Carly about the marathon taper.

Carly: Hi, my question is about tapering for a marathon. Every time I am in three weeks leading up to a marathon, I start to obsess over whether I’m tapering the right way.

Am I cutting back enough? Am I cutting back too much? Am I still incorporating enough little speed without putting my body on risk for injury right before the race?

I’m about a week and a half leading up to a marathon right now and I am hoping I’m doing enough. I do have a coach who is having me do more mileage than I typically do, during my taper.

I like to get to the starting line feeling itchy and chomping at the bet.

There’s probably no one size fits all but I’m just curious to know how to taper and what the best approach is, if there is even one. Thanks so much.

Sinead: Like I said before Carly, this is a fantastic question and one that is so important to your marathon performance. I know we’re going to publish this episode after you’ve already raced, which I do apologize for.

We do get quite a few questions submitted so sometimes they stack up a little bit but I really hope your marathon went well, and I hope that this podcast helps you for future reference.

I am going to go ahead and jump on into your question here but really, it seems like you are concerned as to if you are doing too much, or too little during your taper phase, which is common.

A lot of runners get antsy during the taper phase and that’s natural.

When you are reducing your mileage, and reducing the amount of training that you have become so used to, it it’s so easy to get antsy.

One thing I will say is you do have to remember that you have done all the work up until this point, and whatever you do in the last three weeks isn’t really going to benefit you on race day.

You’re not trying to gain fitness during these three weeks.

You always want to err on the side of doing too little rather than too much but even doing too little can leave you with jelly legs and feeling a bit stale on race day.

Not too ideal on that side of the spectrum either.

That’s why there are some good guidelines to your taper that can break it down for you.

These are guidelines that are tried and true and most every runner responds well to these guidelines.

I am going to go ahead and start from Week three and just work all the way down to race day.

When you’re three weeks out of your marathon, what you want to do is reduce your weekly mileage by about 85-90% of your maximum.

It’s not too difficult to reduce your mileage by 15%.

For example, if you’re running about 50 miles per week, you only need to cut out seven miles from your weekly running routine.

This can be done by either giving yourself an extra rest day or even just simply cutting out two or three miles from your regular recovery runs.

That’s what you want to do in terms of volume.

In terms of intensity, you want to maintain intensity. A lot of training plans drastically cut your workout volumes, starting three weeks out from the race but at Runners Connect, we think it’s a mistake to avoid doing what you’ve been doing for the past 16-20 weeks.

That’s just too much of a shock to your body.

Physiologically, your body takes about 10 days to realize the benefits from a workout and recover.

That’s why we suggested doing your last big workout about 13 days prior to the marathon and just for insurances sake, you don’t want to risk not recovering in time for the race itself.

Three weeks out, you want to maintain intensity and just make sure that your workout is specific to the marathon.

You don’t need to do any sort of V02 Max workouts or speed sessions at this point.

The workout should be similar to what you’ve been doing the rest of your build up.

One thing I will say is not to get too nervous. You’re feeling like you’re having the best workouts of your life at this point. You do have all the training up until that point still in your legs and you’re just at the beginning of your taper.

You’re not going to feel particularly fresh yet so don’t worry about feeling too late on your feet in these workouts.

As for your long run that week, you want to reduce it also by about 10-20% and you don’t need to eliminate the long run yet, but you do want to avoid fatiguing yourself too much.

If your longest run so far was 20 miles, we suggest a run anywhere from 16-18 miles.

Make sure you listen to your body.

If you’re feeling sluggish and tired on your long run, you need to have the confidence to cut the long run back.

Don’t be afraid to do a reduced long run if you are feeling tired and sluggish. Again, at this point you aren’t really trying to gain fitness and much as you are just kind of cruising until you get to the race.

At this point, you would rather err on the side of caution.

That’s three weeks out. Now we’ll move down to two weeks before the race. At this point, you want to reduce your weekly mileage by about 70-75% of your maximum.

Reducing your mileage this week is going to be logistically easier than the previous week.

Your long runs and your intense workouts will be shorter which should be your biggest volume days.

Those will all be reduced in just for example, a 50-mile week will be reduced to about 35-38 miles and at this point you are going to eliminate your long run completely.

You’ll be doing far fewer intense workouts.

Your easier recovery miles should remain relatively stable minus a mile or two here and there.

In terms of your workouts, your higher intensity sessions, you want to do one medium intensity work out this week.

Again, your last decent workout of real difficulty should be about 13 days prior to the race.

Either the Monday or Tuesday of the week before the week of your race. The volume of this workout should be reduced significantly.

It should be reduced by about 60-70% of your normal hard day. For example, if your tempo intervals are usually about nine miles total, this workout should be more like six miles total.

You want to make sure the workout is marathon specific. You’re trying to practice your marathon pace really.

Just work on getting a little bit more muscle memory and tapping into that pace you’re going to want to hit on race day, and avoiding any sort of speed sessions or anything of that nature.

You aren’t trying to gain fitness again.

At this point you’re just trying to practice the pace you want to hit on race day and like I said earlier at this point, you are going to eliminate your long run and replace it with a run that is 50-60% of your long run.

Say you normally do a 20-mile long run; instead you’ll do just a 10-mile easy run. If you are feeling fatigued, don’t hesitate to back off the mileage even a little bit more and opt for a shorter distance that day.

Now we will talk about the final week before the race. At this point, you will be significantly reducing your mileage.

Again, this is difficult for a lot of runners.

It takes a lot of confidence to give your body the rest it needs. You just should remember fitness is there, the hair is the barn, you’ve done all the work, and at this point you need to give your body a chance to catch back up with you.

At this point you want to consider giving yourself an extra rest day and you want to reduce your daily runs by about 50-60% of their normal volume.

For instance, if you’re used to running eight miles on your easy recovery days, you should target more like five to six miles instead.

We advise doing one many fartlek sessions the week of the race.

This helps to alleviate nerves but also reminds your body what that marathon pace feels like.

It is another good way to increase your muscle memory and just practice that pace you’re going to hit in just a few days.

For example, and this does depend on the runner and the level of fitness, but this would be a good freshener workout the week of the race.

You want to do something like a 15-20-minute warmup and then 6-8 by two minutes at Marathon pace with two minutes easy running between.

Then you just want to do about a 10-minute cooldown.

This is a very short and should be a pretty relaxed session. It’s just what I call a freshener workout.

It’s not going to fatigue you really but wake your legs up a little bit, help you practice your goal race pace, and just leave you feeling fresh come race day.

Now we’re down to the day before the marathon.

At Runners Connect we do suggest running the day before the marathon and it’s nothing too extreme this day. Obviously, you want to allow your body to relax and recover as much as possible.

We just suggest running anywhere from about 1-3 miles easy that day. This will help to promote blood flow to your legs and help relieve your nerves a little bit.

It allows you to relax and stimulates your central nervous system which will enable your legs to respond a lot better the following morning.

Carly that is the taper that we have all our Runners Connect members go by.

It’s a taper that really does work on most runners. Obviously, everyone is different. Some people prefer two-week tapers, others prefer even more than three weeks but this one is on average very successful.

I hope this helps and thank you so much for submitting this question.

Before we wrap this up, if you’ve got a question you would like one of our coaches to answer in an upcoming episode please do submit it at runnersconnect.net/daily.

We would absolutely love to hear from you and help however we can so please do submit those questions. I hope you join me again next time and until then you have a fantastic day.