The taper: when the heaviest training for a marathon has ended and you rest up to feel fresh on race day. Sounds great, right? Except that sometimes you don’t feel so hot during your taper. Add prerace nerves, and the whole thing starts messing with your head. Here’s what the pros do to feel sharp, not sluggish, fit, not fat.
Reid Coolsaet, 2:10:28 PR
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Coolsaet drops his mileage sharply during his taper. At his peak for Boston, with five weeks to race day, he ran about 125 miles per week. Then he reduced that to about 110 for two weeks, 85 last week, and 55 this week. He keeps the number of runs he does each week the same, but the length of each run is shorter.
He also tries to stick to his schedule of hard workouts but shorten those as well. “I’m just trying to keep my legs fresh and hit that marathon pace a couple of times per week in the last 10 days.” The Friday before Boston, Coolsaet was planning to run 4 x 2 minutes at marathon pace, “just enough to get my legs spinning,” he said. Before that, on Tuesday, he ran 3 x 3 kilometers at marathon pace.
A “sucker for baked goods,” he tries to lay off the cookies and the ice cream while he’s tapering. And have faith in the downtime. “The first marathon I had to taper, I felt like I was losing fitness,” he said. “But the way I felt in the first part of that marathon, I realized that it worked. Since then—this is probably my 12th or 13th marathon—I just go back to how I good I felt and just trust the process.”
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Tim Ritchie, 2:11:56 PR
- If you feel like you’re in a good rhythm, you don’t have to disturb that with a radical taper.
- Focusing on a final workout a few days before the marathon gives you a good distraction to keep you from dwelling on the race for too long.
Ritchie maintains his mileage at a similar level all the way up until three or four days before race day. Why? He doesn’t run nearly as many miles as his peers to begin with, so there’s not as much to taper down from. As he’s been injury prone during his career, he keeps his miles at about 80 per week, compared to the 120–130 that many others run.
“I like to keep the body in a nice rhythm,” he said. “I think it’s important if what you’re doing is working, keep doing it all the way up to the race, to some level.”
Before Boston, Ritchie suffered a calf strain that upended his training, and his last two weeks before the race have been the most quality he has had during the entire buildup. “You have to walk that line between not pushing too hard—you can’t make up too much ground in the final weeks—but also trying to squeeze in a couple of key workouts,” he said. “I think that happens to a lot of runners: You might come up with an injury in marathon training. How do you balance that with being rested for the race but also being as physically prepared as you can be?”
His last tuneup this time happened on Thursday, and the workout was on the track: 3 x 1 mile at marathon pace (about 5:00 per mile), followed by 4 x 400 meters in 68 to 70 seconds (a little faster than his half marathon race pace). Add in the three-mile warmup and cooldown, and he did about 10 miles of work.
It wasn’t great. “You’re doing it and you’re like, ‘Gosh, 5-minute pace feels so hard right now. How am I going to run 26 of these?’ ” he said. “But training is so different from racing. I’ve always been somebody who’s been able to race above the level that I train.”
He also welcomes at least one day of harder running during the week of the race, so he’s focused on that workout and not thinking so much on a race that is still several days away.
Kellyn Taylor,2:28:40 PR
- Don’t be too concerned with how you feel while tapering; it usually comes together on race day.
- Keep an eye on food intake, because you don’t need as many calories when you’re not running as much.
Taylor arrives at Boston, her fifth marathon, off of the strongest buildup of her career. For four weeks, she ran 130 miles per week, when her previous high had been 118. So she was ready to taper. Two weeks before Boston, she cut back to 77 miles.
The surprise was that she didn’t feel that great with the rest. “I found myself being tired, just tired overall, like I needed to sleep more,” she said.
This week, which she’s calling “a fluff week,” she’s feeling much better. On Wednesday, she put in her last workout: 2 miles at marathon pace, 8 x 400, then 2 miles at marathon pace.
“It felt easy, it felt relaxed,” she said. “Kind of how you want it to feel. I’ve also had the opposite, where I’ve felt exhausted on the last workout, like, ‘Omigosh, how am I ever going to make it through 26.2 miles running this effort?’ But it’s always played out well.
“I think you always have to take the taper with a grain of salt and realize that sometimes you’re not going to feel great and sometimes you will feel great,” Taylor said. “But it all comes together on race day.”
She also tries to keep an eye on her portion sizes during her taper because she knows she doesn’t need as many calories to fuel 77 miles per week as she does 130. “It’s a marathon; weight does matter,” she said. “It’s crappy to say, but it does. If you’re going to gain a few pounds during the taper, that’s a few more pounds you’re going to have to carry during a marathon.”
Galen Rupp, 2:09:20 PR
- Be ready for the strange feeling of tapering—and don’t let that be an excuse not to rest.
- Maintain flexibility in your taper, depending on how you’ve felt leading in and your travel schedule.
Although he doesn’t like to say how much mileage he has been running, Rupp cuts his total by more than half in the two weeks preceding a marathon. In fact, on Thursday before Boston, which will be his fifth marathon, he took the day entirely off.
He acknowledges the contradiction of tapering: It’s supposed to make a runner faster on race day but the abrupt change in routine can leave anyone feeling off.
“It’s real important that you rest,” he said. “It feels a little weird. It’s a strange thing. You just have to have faith that you’re going to feel good on race day. My coach [Alberto Salazar] has always stressed to me, ‘You’re going to feel bad when you start to rest.’ ”
Rupp keeps touching on speed every two to three days during his taper. And although the broad outlines of it are the same before each marathon—a sharp reduction in mileage for two weeks—he keeps it somewhat flexible. “It depends how I’ve been feeling the weeks leading up,” he said. “It can never be this set routine.
Sarah Lorge Butler is a writer and editor living in Eugene, Oregon, and her stories about the sport, its trends, and fascinating individuals have appeared in Runner’s World CA Notice at Collection, Run Your Butt Off! and Walk Your Butt Off!
