Tapering

Getting fit and fast is only part of the equation to having a great day. Not only do you need to ensure that you peak at the right time, which is on the day of your event, but you also need to arrive fully recovered; that is fresh and without any feelings of fatigue.

Peaking and tapering is about ensuring full recovery while maintaining performance adaptations.

Why do you need to taper?
You need to reduce your training volume (taper) to ensure full recovery.

Running training causes muscle damage, fatigue and also depletes carbohydrate stores in muscle. You need to ensure that these factors are reduced as much as possible while at the same time you need to make sure that the adaptations your body has made from your training are not lost.

Ensuring full recovery
Let's take a closer look at the key factors you need to work on for full recovery in the taper:

Muscle Damage -
By reducing training, and in particular long or intense speed training sessions, you will arrive at your event with fresh legs. Quite often marathoners and half marathoners find that it is their legs that give out in the latter part of a race. Starting with muscle soreness or muscle fatigue will increase the risk.

Fatigue -
By fatigue we mean general fatigue from lots of hard training over a prolonged period (10 weeks plus). A proper taper will give you some mental drive, a very necessary component to ensure that you can focus for your event and push hard in the closing stages. Your central nervous system needs several days of light training as a minimum and the longer your buildup the longer the taper needs to be to remove this. One way to do this without getting lethargic is to do wind sprints in the final few days. These are short efforts at or faster than your projected race intensity (PRI).

Carbohydrate Stores -
Your body can only store a limited amount of carbohydrate in muscle (600g or so) and so your final week should focus on maximizing this. You therefore need to ensure that you do keep eating well. But you can overdo it. If you have been training hard you will be eating more food than usual, so when you reduce your training in the taper, most athletes would be advised to keep their energy stores up by keeping the same eating patterns. This also follows the age old rule of not changing anything close to your event. By also timing your meals immediately (<30min) after your training, you will also ensure that you store less of your food as body fat and more as muscle glycogen, which is good general training advice anyway.

Maintaining performance components
You need to make sure that while you are reducing your training so that you are fully recovered you will need to ensure that you maintain all the adaptations from your training. These adaptations have been hard earned so you want to hold onto them. The key areas are cardiovascular endurance, muscular endurance, cardiovascular speed, and muscular (leg) speed.

Cardiovascular (aerobic) Endurance
Many of the adaptations to endurance training are rather permanent things like red blood cell numbers, the oxygen carrying molecule heamoglobin, blood capillary density in muscles and muscles cells mitochondria and oxygen carrying myoglobin don't change rapidly. That's good news if you want to cut back your training and freshen up. So this explains why you can do your last long run as much as a month out from a marathon. You body still maintains the benefit for up to 30 days. The key point here is that you should never be afraid to back off your long run. By reducing your training volume to 1/3 of your highest level you can maintain your cardiovascular fitness for around 8 weeks.

Muscular Endurance
If you are properly rested and have maximized your energy stores and energy usage the next most likely area to cause you to slow down in a marathon is muscle endurance. That is simply that your legs die. Your taper needs to carefully ensure that you maintain these adaptations. You do need to do something of about 1/3 your maximal muscle endurance around 10 days out but also another smaller amount 6 days or so out. For the 10 days out from a marathon a workout of 60min including 50% hills and several hill reps (say 8x400m) at PRI is key. Do this on grass to reduce muscle damage. This workout should feel mildly taxing on the legs but relatively easy in terms of available energy and cardiovascular effort.

Muscular (leg) speed
Leg speed seems to decrease rapidly. Even after a day off from exercise you feel sluggish and part of this is that your ability to turn your legs over fast drops. To combat this you need to include wind sprints; these are 1-200m reps at PRI or slightly faster.

Because you lose leg speed rapidly I think that you should do something on the day before your marathon. There is nothing worse than taking most of the event to get going. A short session building up to your PRI on the day before is also good for your nerves.

Monitor your state of readiness
It is not uncommon for athletes to become sick during the taper. To avoid this monitor how you feel. If you feel lethargic this is a sign that you need to do some speed - even 2x200m at your half marathon pace can be enough to ‘wake your body up'. As you will be able to see the suggested taper includes some faster training on every day except the day two days out.

Individual variation in taper
Some athletes need more training than others when it comes to the final few days. If you need more training to avoid going sluggish, be careful that you don't end up with tired legs and depleted energy stores. Keep on the grass and top up your energy stores as you go.

Therapy and stretching
Many athletes get a massage in the week before their goal event. Our advice is not to do it if you don't get a regular massage or keep it very light.

Contrast water therapy is where you take a hot shower or use a spa or hot bath and follow this with a cold shower, or plunge pool. 3-4x 7min hot and 2min cold works well and can really make you feel alive.

The rule is before exercise use active stretching and after exercise use passive stretching.