Coach, why am I running speedwork in my taper?

The concept of active taper defined.

A great fallacy around tapering in the amateur athletic community is that it is some sort of relaxation period.  Two or three weeks where you lay on the couch and sip Gatorade while waiting for your race to roll around.  This is not true.  The taper period is where you consolidate gains from your training.  This is, yes, partly through resting, but also through fine tuning and staying active.

Like everything else in amateur endurance sports your taper is going to be specific to you.  The way you construct and execute your taper is going to depend on your training cycle and how you responded to it as an athlete.  Depending on your current fitness, your ability level and your recovery needs your taper is going to sit somewhere on the spectrum between the ‘do nothing’ myth and the ‘hard training’ mistake.

One of the questions that runners struggle with going into the marathon taper is “How long should my taper be?”  The most common length of a taper is two weeks.  This means your last hard training week, or your peak week, culminates on the weekend fourteen days or so before your target race.

Younger, more responsive athletes may be able to get away with less than two weeks and still recover well enough to race.  Older runners and back of the packers may take three or even four-week tapers.

The truth is that if you have executed an honest training cycle you have accumulated most of your fitness by the time you get into that last month.  Typical race training cycles have you doing race-specific, tuning work in the final third of the training cycle.  I have seen many runners perform very well in their target races even though they had to step back in the final weeks due to an injury or other challenge.

What kind of intensity and volume should you be doing in the taper weeks?  This depends on how much intensity and volume you’ve been doing in your training cycle.  You take whatever you have done in training and do about 60% in week -2 and maybe 50% in week -1.  The profile of the training is similar, but the volume is less.

For example; if you have been doing consistent speed and tempo training during the training cycle your coach will give you the same cadence of speed and tempo, just in less volume.  This doesn’t add to your fitness, but it does keep your legs ‘fresh’ for the race.  You recruit those same racing muscles, but you don’t over-stress them.

This is the concept of ‘active recovery’.  It may seem counterintuitive at first.  Why do speed and tempo when you’re in your taper?  Isn’t the taper about resting?  Yes, of course you are resting and recovering but if you have trained well you benefit from and recover better with the activity during the taper.  It is a natural ‘fit for use’ way of easing into the recovery.

If you just cut off all activity abruptly your body will not respond well. You will feel sluggish and your legs will have no ‘pop’ on race day.  If you execute the proper active recovery that matches your training cycle you will sharpen that knife’s edge of race fitness.  You’ll feel like a coiled spring on race day.

Another factor to consider in how ‘active’ you should make your taper is how well your body handled the training cycle.  What kind of aches and pains, niggles and nags are you bringing into the taper with you?  If you have some acute hot spots you probably want to avoid the hard stuff and stick to lower impact activity.  There’s nothing worse than tweaking something right before your target race.

How much experience you have will impact how you handle your taper as well.  If you have been racing for years and have accumulated a big base of fitness you needn’t worry too much about the strictness of your taper.  Just keep it within reason.  Don’t do anything stupid.  If you’re a newbie to the taper be cautious and avoid anything new.  Err on the easy side of things.

A big mistake people make, myself included, is to use that extra time during the taper to do something useful.  Like rake the yard or paint the house.  If you have executed a good training cycle then you have necessarily gotten very specific in your fitness.

Focusing on intense marathon training for a few months incidentally can make you quite fragile in unrelated physical activity.  Yes, you are in great race shape, but that doesn’t mean you can go water skiing or build a stone wall.  Likewise resist the urge to start any cross-training activity that you haven’t been doing as part of your normal training.

The unheralded part of the taper is everything outside the physical training.

The part of the taper that many athletes forget is everything outside  This includes preparing your mind, working on your nutrition, and enhancing your flexibility.

For the mental part of your preparation I would recommend any version of meditation or prayer you are comfortable with daily, during your taper.  Especially if you are new to the taper it can be mentally exhausting and you need to energize your mind to deal with it.

Along with the meditation you can do visualization.  Place the perfect race out in your head.  Play over how you will respond to challenges.  Work out your contingencies.  Preview the race in your head.  Get comfortable with it.

Tapering makes neurotics out of all of us.  One way to ease this neurosis is to prepare what we can.  Lay out your race gear.  Double check your check list.  Procure and prep your nutrition for race weekend.  Get your final logistics sorted out.  Get a haircut.  Cut your toenails and do any foot care you need to a few days ahead of time.

Included in this neurosis category is the concept of dry runs.  If you can run the last few miles of the course during your taper that will help you visualize the finish.  You can dry run your packing or travel.  Whatever it takes to let your mind feel at ease.

You may not be able to sleep, but the taper is a fantastic time to catch up on sleep.  There are some great guided breathing meditations that you can get that will help you clear your mind for sleep.  You can also make a list or keep a gratitude journal to review before going to bed.

Having raced over 60 marathons in the last 20 years I don’t waste a lot of energy in my taper anymore.  I feel a great sense of relief to be past the hard part of the training and am excited for the test to come.

If you have trained well, you will have to do something truly stupid during your taper to ruin your race.  The best strategy is to keep doing what you’ve been doing, just do less of it and ease into the race with active recovery.