Tapering--You’ve Earned It
Daily Tip #2
In the week before a race, there’s almost nothing you can do to get faster, but a very effective way to be slower than you could be on the big day is to run too much and/or too hard in that last week. In fact, even your usual daily running becomes “overtraining” in this period. But it’s good news: You get to taper.
A taper is what it sounds like: a gradual tapering-off of your training mileage and intensity from at least one week out. With a week to go, your work is done. The benefits of your training buildup are real parts of your body now: more alveoli (air sacs) in your lungs to pull in more oxygen, more red blood cells to carry that oxygen to your muscles, and more (and widened) capillaries for that blood to flow through. But other changes have occurred that need to be reversed now. During hard training, your resting pulse is slightly elevated because your heart is working hard to get the waste products out of your system. You’ve got microscopic tears in the fibers of your running muscles; if you’re sore at all, the damage has been a bit more severe. Your feet, knees, and back probably aren’t giving you the heartiest of welcomes when you put your weight on them in the morning. The cure for all of this is the taper.
Your mileage should decrease by about 20 percent in the second-to-last week before your half-marathon, and then by about another 25 percent in the pre-race week. If you’ve reached 40 miles per week in the middle of your training, you’ll only be running about 23 miles in the seven days before the race. Those days might look like this for a 40-miles-per-week athlete:
Sunday: Final medium-long run (6-8 miles)
Monday: 2-3 miles easy or day off
Tuesday: Short tempo run (see Tip #1): 1 mile easy, 4 miles at tempo pace, 1 mile easy
Wednesday: 3 miles easy
Thursday: 1 mile easy, 6 to 8 striders (see Tip #2) with equal-distance jogs between them, 1 mile easy (2.5 miles total)
Friday: 2 miles easy or day off
Saturday: 1 to 2 miles easy
Total: 18.5 to 26.5 miles
If days off don’t bother you, it’s fine to take a couple as you prime yourself for the race. If going without your daily run makes you feel like your feet are on backwards the next day, a couple of easy miles won’t hurt, either. The important thing is that nothing in this week challenges you in the least: You should finish every workout feeling as though you could easily do it again. And please don’t use that extra time and energy to play your first tennis match in months or finally use that
guest pass at the gym. You’re going to have a very good place and occasion to make use of your saved-up energy: cruising through Times Square on Sunday, looking ahead to your left turn at the Hudson River with four miles to run, your fitness tapered to an exquisitely sharp edge.
