A Passion for Running

Welcome to the home of Mark aka The Running Blogfather – a 40 year-old dad, husband and marathon runner who's beaten injury and is on the comeback trail!

how do YOU taper?

passion for running category: running on Thursday, September 30 2004

What is your strategy for tapering before a race? There are many thoughts out there on the art of tapering before a marathon – or other distance races for that matter.

My taper? Every two days for the next several I will run very short distances – 15 to 20 minutes tops. Those runs will be done at marathon pace. Call it “fine tuning”.

I’ll do that till next Wednesday and won’t run at all Thursday, Friday and Saturday.

Besides the running aspect of tapering, I’ll also be getting lots of sleep and will carbo-load like there’s no tomorrow all next week – especially Thursday, Friday and Saturday.

How about you?




6 Comments

947

Comment by Dianna (RCOH)

Thursday September 30, 2004 @

Since this is my first real “taper,” I’m just doing what Hal Higdon tells me to. This week the runs are 4,6,3 and 8. Next week 3,4, and 2. I’m all about the eating, drinking and sleeping and cannot wait to load up and bloat up next week!

948

Comment by Chris Brogan...

Thursday September 30, 2004 @

I don’t exactly taper. I kind of fall out of favor with miles, but not in any meaningful way. Some day, I’ll get a better sense of it.

949

Comment by Deene

Thursday September 30, 2004 @

No formal taper for me. I just don’t run the day before.

950

Comment by Lafe

Thursday September 30, 2004 @

My life is a taper. I’ll let you know when I quit tapering. ;)

951

Comment by Oliver

Thursday September 30, 2004 @

Actually I recommend not to slow down too much. A usual training week in the week before. In the week of the marathon I just reduce a bit the distance of each run, maybe doing one run with intervalls (faster than marathon pace but in total less than 50mins), possibly two 10k runs (slow/medium pace), and having on Friday and/or Saturday runs from 25 to 35 mins. I don’t like to be too “lazy”, regeneration is usually very good after the harder training weeks before and I don’t like to loose focus!
Off course, I don’t know if this made me faster or slower in the past ;-)

965

Comment by Mike Paus

Friday October 01, 2004 @

My taper involves a lot of time on the couchmobile, regenerating all the muscle I tore up on my 21 miler. I’m just about back to 100%. I don’t plan on running more then 2 or 3 miles at a time for the week before the marathon.

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
A blue box by your comment means you do not have an avatar from www.gravatar.com!

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.