The Marathon Taper: Why Doing Less Can Help You Race Better

You’ve spent months building mileage, getting your long runs done, squeezing workouts into busy weeks and watching your training volume climb.

Then suddenly, your race is getting close and your training plan starts asking you to do… less.

Welcome to the taper.

For a lot of runners, this can be one of the strangest parts of marathon training. After months of being told that consistency matters, you’re now being told to back off.

Cue the questions:

Am I running enough?

Am I going to lose fitness?

Should I squeeze in one more big workout?

Why do my legs suddenly feel terrible?

Before you decide to sneak another 30K long run into your schedule, let’s talk about what the taper is actually supposed to accomplish.

What Is a Taper?

A taper is a planned reduction in training load leading into a race.

The important word there is reduction.

A taper isn’t stopping your training altogether. Instead, we’re trying to reduce some of the accumulated fatigue from weeks and months of training while maintaining the fitness you’ve worked so hard to build.

And there’s good evidence behind it.

Research in endurance athletes supports reducing training volume during the taper while maintaining some training intensity.

In other words:

Do less. But don’t necessarily do nothing.

Am I Going to Lose Fitness?

This is probably one of the biggest taper fears.

You finally feel fit. You’ve built your mileage. Your biggest long runs are behind you.

Now you’re supposed to run less?

A properly planned taper isn’t going to suddenly erase months of training.

Remember what we’re trying to accomplish:

Shed fatigue while retaining fitness.

Training creates both.

Throughout a marathon build, you aren’t just accumulating fitness. You’re also accumulating fatigue. As race day approaches, continuing to pile on training isn’t necessarily going to make you perform better.

At some point, we need to let the fatigue come down so the fitness underneath it can actually show up.

Should I Stop Doing Workouts?

Not necessarily.

One of the biggest misconceptions about tapering is that everything suddenly needs to become slow and easy.

Your overall training volume should decrease, but that doesn’t mean all intensity has to disappear.

That might mean keeping some marathon-pace running, strides or shorter faster intervals in your program—but doing less total work than you would during peak training.

You want your legs to remember how running quickly feels.

You just don’t need to exhaust them in the process.

What Happens to the Long Run?

It gets shorter.

Your biggest long runs should already be behind you by the time you’re deep into your taper.

That can feel uncomfortable, especially when you’ve become accustomed to spending a substantial portion of every weekend running.

But another huge long run close to race day isn’t going to suddenly unlock a new level of marathon fitness.

Which brings us to perhaps the most important taper rule…

You Cannot Cram for a Marathon

We’ve all done it before an exam.

Marathons don’t work that way.

If you missed a workout three weeks ago, you don’t need to make it up now.

If your biggest long run didn’t go perfectly, you don’t need another one just to prove you can do it.

If you’re suddenly questioning your fitness ten days before race day, a monster workout isn’t the answer.

The physiological adaptations from training take time.

At this stage, one enormous workout is much more capable of giving you fatigue, soreness or an injury than it is of giving you meaningful new fitness before race day.

The hay is in the barn.

Leave it there.

What About Strength Training?

Strength training doesn’t necessarily need to disappear the moment your taper starts either.

But just like your running, the dose should change.

This isn’t the time to introduce new exercises, dramatically increase loads or chase a new squat PB.

As you get closer to race day, reducing strength-training volume can help limit residual soreness and fatigue.

You want to maintain the qualities you’ve built without creating something your body now needs several days to recover from.

Race week especially is not the week to discover Bulgarian split squats.

Your quads will remember.

Why Do I Suddenly Feel Terrible?

Ah, yes.

The taper crazies.

You expected decreasing your mileage to make you feel incredible.

Instead, your legs feel heavy.

Your easy run feels awkward.

Something in your calf feels slightly weird.

You check it approximately 47 times.

Suddenly you’re wondering whether you’ve lost all of your fitness since Sunday.

Feeling a little flat or noticing random sensations during a taper doesn’t automatically mean something has gone wrong. Your routine and training load have changed, and you’re also paying considerably more attention to your body because race day is approaching.

That said, genuinely concerning or worsening pain shouldn’t simply be dismissed as “taper crazies.” If something feels like an injury rather than normal pre-race weirdness, get it assessed.

Don’t Try Anything New

Race week is spectacularly boring.

That’s a good thing.

This is not the week for:

New shoes.

New gels.

A new pre-race breakfast.

A new supplement.

A new strength workout.

A massage or recovery technique you’ve never tried.

Or anything else that makes you say, “Apparently this is supposed to be amazing before a marathon.”

Use the shoes you’ve trained in.

Eat foods you’ve practiced with.

Use the fueling strategy you’ve rehearsed.

Stick with what your body already knows.

Race week is execution week—not experimentation week.

So What Should You Do During the Taper?

Keep running, but run less.

Keep a little intensity.

Prioritize sleep.

Fuel your body properly.

Stay hydrated.

Give yourself opportunities to recover.

And perhaps hardest of all:

Trust your training.

You don’t need to prove your fitness during the taper.

That’s what race day is for.

The Bottom Line

The taper can feel uncomfortable because it asks runners to do the opposite of what they’ve spent months learning to do.

Instead of adding more, we’re taking some away.

But you’re not trying to become dramatically fitter in the final days before your marathon.

You’re trying to arrive at the start line healthy, recovered and ready to use the fitness you’ve already built.

The work is done.

Now let it work.

— Nth° Running

References

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.

Spilsbury KL, Fudge BW, Ingham SA, Faulkner SH, Nimmo MA. Tapering strategies in elite British endurance runners.European Journal of Sport Science. 2015;15(5):367–373.

Rosenblat MA, Perrotta AS, Thomas SG. Effect of high-intensity interval training versus sprint interval training on time-trial performance: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Sports Medicine. 2020;50:1145–1161.

Training and tapering strategies of endurance athletes: a systematic review and meta-analysis. PLOS ONE. 2023.