Why running less before race day can make you faster 

Lewis Horenko. Former athlete, Athletics Australia coach, founder of 1609. 

Somewhere between now and the start line, you are going to feel worse than you have all year. If it’s already happening, keep reading. 

Heavy legs. A calf that has suddenly developed opinions. A run that felt like nothing in August and feels like a job today. 

You haven’t lost it. I promise you haven’t lost it. You have never in your life paid this much attention to your left calf, and that’s the only thing that’s changed. This is what the taper feels like from the inside. Nobody warns you. 

And if the build didn’t go to plan, injury, illness, life getting in the way, breathe. The taper still applies. You just have less to taper from. Cramming now won’t get the missed weeks back. It will only make you tired for the one week that  matters. 

Here’s the part that’s harder to hear. Most people get this bit wrong. In a study  of more than 158,000 marathon builds pulled from Strava, two in three  recreational runners didn’t taper properly [4]. Not the training. The taper.  Months of good work, then a fortnight of second-guessing, and minutes left out  on the road. So let’s not do that. 

What a taper actually is 

Training does two things to you at once. It makes you fitter and it makes you tired. The bit nobody tells you is that those two don’t leave at the same speed. Tiredness is a visitor. Fitness lives there. Back off at the right moment and the tiredness packs up, the fitness is still where you left it, and for the first time in  months you get to run on all of it. 

That’s the whole trick. Scientists have been describing it that way since the 1970s [1], and it’s why pretty much every serious endurance athlete backs off  before they race. 

The awkward part is the middle. There’s a stretch where the tiredness hasn’t  fully left and the freshness hasn’t arrived, and it feels exactly like going backwards. Flat runs. Niggles that turn up from nowhere and leave the same way. That is not the plan failing. That is the plan. 

What the research says 

I’d rather show you than ask you to trust me. 

Twenty-seven studies on competitive athletes, pooled. The sweet spot was about two weeks of easing off, total volume down 41 to 60 per cent, with the speed of  the sessions and the number of training days left untouched [2]. Done properly  it’s worth 2 to 3 per cent [3]. Over 42.2 km that isn’t seconds. It’s minutes. 

That’s not just the pros. In the Strava study, the runners who held a proper  three-week taper, volume falling every single week into the race, came home about five and a half minutes ahead of where the data says they’d have landed off a minimal taper [4]. The ones whose mileage crept back up for a week in the  middle gave some of that back. The study calls it a relaxed taper. I’d call it  nerves. It’s a very human thing to do. 

And you don’t lose anything doing this. You gain something. In a small study of American college runners, three weeks of taper left the aerobic engine exactly where it was. The fast-twitch fibres are what changed. Bigger. Nine per cent more powerful. Three per cent faster over 8 km [5]. A small study of  recreational marathoners tapering into their race found a similar pattern, their  fast-twitch fibres stronger coming out of the taper than going in [6]. That bounce you feel on race morning, when you’ve done this right, is real. You can measure it in the muscle. 

Two honest caveats, because you deserve them. The muscle studies are small. The Strava study is training logs, not a controlled trial, and the authors say so themselves. What settles me is that lab work, real-world data and biopsies all point the same way. When three different kinds of evidence agree, I stop  arguing. 

Two weeks or three? The lab says two. The real world says three, and four  added nothing. Anywhere in between is fine. If this build was the biggest you’ve  ever done, lean longer. You’ve got more tiredness to shed. 

Why your body feels better and your head feels worse

This is the part the plan never mentions. 

In 2023 a group of sport psychologists read everything ever published on the  psychology of tapering. Forty-eight studies. The pattern will sound familiar. Mood generally lifts as the taper goes on. Tension often doesn’t. It can sit high all the way to the start line, which the authors put down to plain old  performance anxiety [10]. Their conclusion was that the taper is, oddly, both a  stressor and a preparation at the same time. So if you feel fresher and edgier in  the same week, that isn’t a contradiction. That’s the taper. 

What you do with the edge matters more than how much of it you have. Before  a big meet, researchers asked 97 elite swimmers and 114 club swimmers about  their nerves. The same amount, across both groups. The difference was that the elite swimmers had learned to read their nerves as helping, and they walked  onto the blocks more confident because of it [11]. Same feeling. Different story  about it. The follow-up paper by the same group has the best title in the whole  field: Making the butterflies fly in formation [12]. 

How to taper for a marathon 

Here’s the shape I use with my own athletes. A starting point, not gospel. A  hundred-kilometre week and a forty-kilometre week won’t taper identically, but  the shape is the same. 

	Volume	Long run	Sessions
3 weeks out	About 80 per  cent of your  biggest week	26 to 30 km, or your  longest run of the  build, whichever is  shorter	Keep your normal session.  Last proper hit-out at  marathon pace.
2 weeks out	About 60 per  cent	16 to 20 km	One shorter session.  Something like 3 x 3 km at  marathon pace with a jog  between.
Race week	Roughly half, or less	None. 15 to 20 min  easy the day before,  with a few relaxed  strides.	Midweek: 15 min easy, 4 x  2 min at marathon pace,  cool down. Nothing hard  after Wednesday.

So what does that look like for Melbourne? 

By the time you read this you’re already inside the taper, so let’s start with the week  that’s left. 

Race week, 5 to 10 October. Roughly half your normal week, or less. The  minutes below suit someone who has been running 50 to 60 km a week. Bigger  weeks than that, add ten minutes to the easy days. Smaller, take ten off. 

Monday. Thirty minutes easy. 

Tuesday. Twenty to thirty minutes easy. 

Wednesday. Fifteen minutes easy, 4 x 2 minutes at marathon pace, easy cool  down. That’s the last thing that feels like work before Sunday. Do it early. The  gun goes at 6:15, and your body should have run at that hour at least once this  week so race morning isn’t the first time it’s asked. 

Thursday. Twenty to thirty minutes easy. 

Friday. Twenty minutes easy, or your rest day if that’s where it normally falls.  From here the food goes up as the running comes down. The sports nutrition  consensus is 10 to 12 grams of carbohydrate per kilo of body weight per day for  the last 36 to 48 hours [8]. That’s a lot of rice. It’s meant to be. Spread it across the day and go easier on fibre than usual. 

Saturday. Fifteen to twenty minutes easy with a few relaxed strides. If you  always rest the day before a race and it settles you, rest. That’s the only extra day off I’d give you. 

Sunday. 42.2 km, flatter than it has ever been, finish on the G. Go out like someone who knows that. 

And the fortnight before it. If you’ve still got two weeks, this week is the  middle row: long run down to 16 to 20 km, one shorter session, about 60 per  cent. The week before that was the last big long run and your normal session at  about 80 per cent. If that’s roughly what your last fortnight looked like, good. If it isn’t, you can’t get it back, and trying to will only make you tired for the one week that matters. Run the row you’re in. 

The four traps 

The ones I see most. 

The test run.

01

Ten days out, the itch arrives. You want proof the fitness is still in there, so you go and flog a session, or race a parkrun. Please don’t. Nothing hard you do in the last ten days adds fitness you’ll get to use on Sunday. Plenty of it can make you tired or hurt. The proof you’re after is in your training log.

Go and read it. It’s all there.

The scales.

02

You’ll probably be about a kilo heavier on race morning. It isn’t fat. Every gram of carbohydrate your muscles store brings roughly three grams of water with it [7], and that’s exactly what you want in your legs at 32 km. Don’t cut carbs because your jeans feel tight.

Your jeans aren’t running the marathon.

The relaxed taper.

03

You back off for a week, you feel fresh, and a small voice says one more big week won’t hurt. The 158,000-runner data says the people who listened to that voice ran slower than the people who didn’t [4]. The benefit comes from the taper being continuous.

One good week does not buy you a bad one.

The first five kilometres.

04

This is the one that hurts to watch. The taper hands you the freshest legs you’ve had in months, the crowd is loud, and the first few kilometres feel like nothing at all. That’s how people spend four months getting the hard part right and give it away in the first eleven minutes. Melbourne has made this easier to get wrong this year, not harder. The climb at 36 km is gone and the course now runs the other way along Beach Road. Flatter course, fresher legs, louder crowd, and all three are arguing for you to go out too fast. For what it’s worth, the Strava data says men are more likely than women to do exactly that and pay for it late [4, 13]. That’s pacing, not fitness, and it’s entirely fixable.

The taper gives you the fitness on the day. Pacing decides whether you get to spend it.

References 

1. Banister EW, Calvert TW, Savage MV, Bach T. A systems model of training for athletic  performance. Australian Journal of Sports Medicine. 1975;7:57-61. 

2. Bosquet L, Montpetit J, Arvisais D, Mujika I. Effects of tapering on performance: a meta analysis. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise. 2007;39(8):1358-1365. 

3. Mujika I, Padilla S. Scientific bases for precompetition tapering strategies. Medicine & Science  in Sports & Exercise. 2003;35(7):1182-1187. 

4. Smyth B, Lawlor A. Longer disciplined tapers improve marathon performance for recreational  runners. Frontiers in Sports and Active Living. 2021;3:735220. 

5. Luden N, Hayes E, Galpin A, et al. Myocellular basis for tapering in competitive distance  runners. Journal of Applied Physiology. 2010;108(6):1501-1509. 

6. Trappe S, Harber M, Creer A, et al. Single muscle fiber adaptations with marathon training.  Journal of Applied Physiology. 2006;101(3):721-727.

7. Olsson KE, Saltin B. Variation in total body water with muscle glycogen changes in man. Acta  Physiologica Scandinavica. 1970;80(1):11-18. 

8. Burke LM, Hawley JA, Wong SHS, Jeukendrup AE. Carbohydrates for training and competition.  Journal of Sports Sciences. 2011;29(S1):S17-S27. 

9. Warden SJ, Davis IS, Fredericson M. Management and prevention of bone stress injuries in  long-distance runners. Journal of Orthopaedic & Sports Physical Therapy. 2014;44(10):749- 765. 

10. Stone MJ, Knight CJ, Hall R, Shearer C, Nicholas R, Shearer DA. The psychology of athletic  tapering in sport: a scoping review. Sports Medicine. 2023;53(4):777-801. 

11. Jones G, Hanton S, Swain A. Intensity and interpretation of anxiety symptoms in elite and non elite sports performers. Personality and Individual Differences. 1994;17(5):657-663. 

12. Hanton S, Jones G. The acquisition and development of cognitive skills and strategies: I.  Making the butterflies fly in formation. The Sport Psychologist. 1999;13(1):1-21. 

13. Smyth B. Fast starters and slow finishers: a large-scale data analysis of pacing at the  beginning and end of the marathon for recreational runners. Journal of Sports Analytics.  2018;4:229-242. 

Epictetus quotation: Enchiridion, chapter 5, Thomas Wentworth Higginson translation, 1890.  Public domain.