Tapering before a race: the last two weeks

The race is twelve days away. The long runs are done, your fitness is what it is, and all that is left is getting to the start line rested without losing it.

Tapering means cutting volume and keeping pace. Most runners do the opposite. They skip the intervals to save their legs and keep running nearly the same distance, and turn up both heavy-legged and out of touch with race pace.

Cut the distance, keep the pace

Fatigue disappears faster than fitness does. That is the whole idea. Four months of aerobic work stays with you for weeks, while your legs shed their tiredness in a few days. The taper lives in that gap.

The research was pulled together in a 2007 review covering some twenty studies. The setup that gave the most was two weeks, a 40 to 60 percent cut in volume, and unchanged intensity and unchanged number of sessions. The average gain landed around two percent. On a 3:30 marathon that is a little over four minutes, which is a lot for something you get by resting.

Two percent is also not much. If your autumn has been a mess, no two weeks will fix it. The taper is not where the race is won, it is where it can be lost.

How long depends on the race

A marathon needs the most, two to three weeks. A half gets by on ten to fourteen days, and a full build-up with the taper written into it sits in the half marathon plan for going under 2 hours. For 10K and 5K a week or so is enough.

Run few sessions a week and you need less taper, simply because there is less accumulated fatigue to shed. Three days easy before the race can do the whole job, which follows the same logic as marathon training on three runs a week.

If the race is a tune-up in the middle of a block, skip the taper altogether. Two easy days, then race on the legs you have. Tapering properly for every race you sign up for is an efficient way to never string a real training block together.

The last long run

For a marathon it sits three weeks out. The weekend after that the long run drops to about two thirds, and the final weekend to half. For a half marathon, do the last long one ten days out.

A long run nine days before a marathon builds no fitness that has time to land. All it has time to do is leave fatigue behind.

Race week

Keep the pace and shorten the session. Three or four days out, twenty minutes easy plus five or six minutes at race pace broken into short pieces works well. It keeps your feel for the pace alive and costs nothing.

The day before is rest, or twenty minutes easy with a few strides if doing nothing makes you stiff. No session that week will make you faster. Several of them can make you slower.

The tempting one is a last fitness test. Your legs feel heavy, the doubt arrives, and you want to run something hard to prove to yourself that the fitness is still there. That session does not answer the question, and it costs you two days.

Feeling wrong is normal

Heavy legs, poor sleep, knees that complain although they never have before, a cold that feels like it is coming. Almost everyone gets some of it during the taper and it says nothing about your fitness. Your body is repairing things it has put off for weeks.

Weight often goes up a kilo or two in the last days. That is glycogen holding water, which is exactly what you want to bring to the start.

There is also a lot of spare time. Taper weeks are when people go out and try new shoes.

Change nothing now

New shoes, a new breakfast, a gel brand you have not tested, a quick weight cut in the final week. It is the same risk every time: you try something unrehearsed on the one day that counts. Work out what you ate before your best long run and repeat it.

Carb loading applies to races over roughly an hour, and it does not have to be complicated. More rice and pasta and less fibre for the last two or three days goes a long way.

If the weeks before fell apart

Illness or a trip that ate two weeks cannot be made up this late. Missed training is missed, and what remains is adjusting the goal rather than compressing the taper and hoping.

If you have been ill, go more carefully than usual. Telling ordinary taper heaviness apart from a body about to get sick is hard on feel alone, and how to read the recovery numbers is covered in its own piece.

Where the rules of thumb run out

The two-week rule is built on an average. Go into the taper already emptied and you need longer. Train moderately and rarely hard and you need less, and three tapered weeks can leave you undertrained on the start line.

Coach Fartlek is our own app, so expect bias. The taper sits as a block of its own in the plan, and its length follows how important the race is: one to two weeks before a goal race, a few days before one you are just running. If the final month does not go as intended, the block is recalculated against the training you actually did, and you can ask why the week looks the way it does and argue back when the answer does not match.

The app needs a watch connected through Intervals.icu and covers 5K to marathon. Pricing is on the pricing page, and there is a free trial.

Do as little as possible during these two weeks. It is the hardest session in the whole plan.