Tapering for Your Big Race

Jonathan Wilson, DPT
HCA Virginia Sports Medicine
Chippenham Hospital

Runners are good at listening and following instructions. We are especially good if these instructions include running more, longer, or harder. If the work-out seems almost impossible, we are excited to push out bodies to complete it. However, runners are quick to stop everything and wait, as if they are waiting for a punchline to a joke, when we are told to taper.

Taper?

Taper, as in running less? That cannot be right. Tapering is just another word for resting, right?

No. Tapering has been shown in many research studies to help improve performance on race day. Research has shown tapering has improved performance from on average 3 to 5 percent, with a high of 16 percent! A 5% increase, would take a 4:00 hour marathon and improve it by 12 full minutes, to give you a 3:48 marathon. Just by tapering and resting, you could run faster by 12 minutes. Not too shabby.

The goal of tapering is to find the balance between maintaining the cardiovascular fitness level you have obtained through hard work, and resting to reduce fatigued muscle and stressed tissue from training. If you taper for too long, you could risk losing the cardiovascular fitness level you gained. However, if you do not taper long enough your body and muscles will be fatigued and not at optimal performance level come race morning.

So, how do you taper?

Tapering is individualized like running programs, shoes, and styles. However, there are general rules you can follow to find a good tapering plan for you.

The overall length of your taper is based on the distance of your race. This is pretty simple. Research supports the below as the optimal number of days to taper for specific races:

Cut back on mileage, NOT intensity or frequency. Reference the below chart for percent of weekly mileage to decrease:

The overall goal of tapering is to allow your body to rest and heal from your training, while not losing the cardiovascular gains you have worked so hard to obtain. It is also important to mentally feel like you are not getting "out of shape” while cutting back from running before your big race.

By maintaining the amount of times you run (frequency) and running at your target race pace (intensity), but cutting down on the overall mileage, you should mentally feel like you have maintained your current fitness level as your body rests. In other words, you are gaining speed on your race day from running less. It simply does not get better than that.

After your race, if you would like a consultation on your results, how to improve performance, or to schedule a comprehensive Biomechanical Gait Video Analysis, contact Jonathan Wilson, DPT, at hcavasportsmed.com, or HCA Virginia Sports Medicine’s Boulders location at 804.560.6500.