The answer is … I don’t know. There seem to be as many different schools of thought on how to taper as there are flavors of frozen yogurt (yes I’m craving some right now, who isn’t in the last week before their marathon!).
So Many Flavors, Such Few Days to Try Them All
It’s too late to really change my tapering plans, but as with any taper the mind does get a little warped so I decided to go back and look at my previous tapers and also do some reading. There’s calls for 3 week tapers, 10 day tapers, 2 weeks tapers, very little up tempo work, quite a bet of up tempo work. The only thing that seems consistent is reduce your overall effort … when to do it, how much to do it by, what type of workouts to do result in different opinions. And no one opinion is right or wrong when you look at the results from these groups and athletes.
So what has worked for me. I went back and looked at my running log for the last few years. Since the first season with Team Rogue my taper has been around two weeks and hasn’t been a huge drop in mileage. Below are my last two taper weeks from two different races (both at CIM), the first from 2008 (sub 3:00 race) and the second form 2010 (sub 2:50 race).
CIM 2008
| Mon | Tue | Wed | Thur | Fri | Sat | Sun | Total Miles |
Miles of Base |
| Rest | 9 M (5 Steady) |
10 M | 7 M (4 Tempo) |
Rest | 13 M | 7 M | 46 | 84% |
| Rest | 7 M (6 @ MGP) |
7 M | 7 M | Rest | 7 M | Race | 54.2 | 99% |
CIM 2010
| Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat | Sun | Total Miles |
Miles of Base |
| 4 M | 10 M | 12 M | 13 M (5 Tempo) |
Rest | 13 M | 11 M | 63 | 90% |
| Rest | 8M (4 Tempo) |
11 M | 7 M (4 Steady) |
Rest | 5 M | Race | 57.2 | 82% |
So it’s really about a 10 to 15% drop. If you exclude the actual marathon the week leading up to the race is around 50% of the base so the day of the marathon I tended to feel relatively fresh. I’ve found the shorter tempo or steady work 5 to 12 days before the race is really valuable too, keeps the legs primed. I remember going into a race once without much MGP or Tempo work in the two weeks before the race and my legs felt really loose, almost too loose and unresponsive. This approach has worked for me in the past so I’m sticking to something similar for CIM this year.
CIM 2012 Taper Plan
| Mon | Tue | Wed | Thur | Fri | Sat | Sun | Total Miles |
Miles of Base |
| Rest | 8 M (10k Ladder) |
8 M | 9 M (4 Tempo) |
4 M | 14 M | 9 M | 52 | 90% |
| Rest | 8 M (5 MGP) |
8 M | 8 M | Rest | 5 M | Race | 55.2 | 95% |
The 2012 plan is somewhere between 2008 and 2010 so should be good for me. My training from a volume and pace standpoint also happens to be between the 2008 and 2010 seasons. All there is left to do is just run the race … and keep the taper mental daemons and phantom leg pains at bay.
Austin Metronome 