Website - www.legacyendurance.com
Soul Runner Movie - www.soulrunnermovie.com

Alright guys. So we're talking about tapering. So tapering is something that you do before you lead up to an important race. So you're A race or any race for that matter, we look at doing what's called a taper period. Simple put, what a taper period is it's a period of time before a race where you reduce both the volume and the intensity of your work outs. You should have been working super heard, you should've come through a peak season, a really hard cycle in your training, and now you're on your marathon or half marathon, whatever it might be. So now it's time to taper. So what does that look like?

Well, it depends on a couple things. It depends on your fitness level. Elite athletes need a little less time to taper than the average person would. So for example, here's kind of a rule of thumb that I would recommend for you as far as how long you should be tapering for. Marathons you should be somewhere in that two to three weeks, so 14 to 21 days before your event you should begin your taper period. If you're running a half marathon, that might be somewhere in the 10 to 14 days, and for 5 and 10K races, you still want to taper in there. That might be like five or seven days of really reducing volume and intensity.

You want to continue to train during that time, but you're certainly not going to be doing hard, intense work out. It's going to be a lot of easy mileage, a lot of nice relaxed, chill running. The work is in the bag. You can't get any more fit in those last couple weeks, os the important part of tapering is to start to reduce that volume and intensity to enhance muscle recovery, enhance your body's ability to repair. So that's the reason why we taper. Now here's a couple things you should be expecting during the taper: if you're like me and a lot of marathoners or runners, you're going to get anxious in that time. You're going to feel like you're not working hard enough. It's totally normal and that's okay. Actually, I think a lot of people actually start to get grump and I'm one of those people, too. I start to get really edgy in the last few weeks leading into a race because of that taper. So it's something you should just be expecting. Know that that's coming and don't let yourself get rattled. Ti's part of the process, it's part of your training, and it's super critical.

Here's a couple tips for you to do during the taper. This helps me to sort of stay focused and not get too worried about not working hard enough. So here's some things you can do to keep your mind going during that taper period. And it's actually very helpful in your race. First thing I'd recommend is; study the course you're running. Have a look at the course profile. Have a look at where the aid stations are, look at where the turns are. There's a lot of times you can find on YouTube videos of the course and you can observe and look at sort of what are some of the key points in that race. It's actually a nice visual you can have and it's just something that can help you to not have to be so anxious come race day; it takes one last thing out of your mind, you've had some time to mentally prepare for that. You can also look at what does the age station serving; what type of drink, what type of gels, where will you find stuff on the course. Not that you have to memorize those things, but it will give you something to think about, help you sort of create your race strategy going in. So that's super helpful.

Another thing you can do is make sure you get a lot of rest in those last couple or three weeks. You've worked your butt off at this point, take your rest. Stay super hydrated, get height hours of sleep each night if you can. You need to really promote recovery so you can perform your best come race day. Speaking of that last couple weeks, one thing I'll give you as one last tip is to, which I see happen for a lot of people, is it's very common for people to get sick in the last couple weeks. You start to let yourself sort of just relax a little bit, you come out of that intense period of training, and your body starts to maybe get a little bit, you know, your immune system starts to come down. So one recommendation is start pumping vitamin C, make sure your diet is on point, make sure you're getting lots of fluids, lots of rest, and not letting that happen to you.

свернуть