The Taper: Peaking for the Meet That Matters

Full Transcript

The Taper: Peaking for the Meet That Matters

Cold Open

In 1992, nine middle distance runners walked into a lab at McMaster University in Ontario.

Eight weeks of hard training already in their legs.

The researchers gave every one of them three different final weeks before a test.

One week, they rested. No running at all.

One week, they kept running, but they kept it easy. Moderate mileage, nothing fast.

And one week, they cut the mileage way down, but every run they did do was fast.

Then the test. A treadmill set at each runner’s best 1500 meter pace. Run until you can’t.

After the week of rest, they got worse. Three percent worse.

After the easy week, six percent better.

After the short, fast week, they lasted 22 percent longer.

Same nine runners. Same eight weeks of training. Same fitness.

The only thing that changed was what they did in the last seven days.

That’s this episode.

Intro

Welcome back to Salty Talks.

I’m Coach Saltmarsh, 25 years coaching, 31 state champions, and every single October I still have to talk myself out of one more workout.

A few episodes back, in the Michigan episode, I said don’t run it inside two weeks of your championship. By then you’re sharpening, not building. I promised an episode on that. This is it.

This drops on October 18th. If your championship is two weeks from Saturday, and for a lot of you it is, your taper starts this week. Maybe today.

Here’s my opinion up front.

The taper is the scariest two weeks of the season for a coach. Everything in you says do more. You see a kid who looks a little flat and your first instinct is to fix it with a workout.

That instinct has cost more championship races than any bad workout ever did in September.

So today: what a taper actually does in the body, what the research says about how much to cut, the mistakes I see every single fall, a 14-day high school taper you can put on your calendar tonight, and how to bring a whole team to a sharp point on the one day the season is decided.

Let’s go.

Segment One · The Fitness Is Already in the Bank

Every hard day you’ve run since August did two things to your athletes. It built fitness. And it built fatigue.

Those two don’t move at the same speed. Fitness is slow. It takes weeks to build and weeks to lose. Fatigue is fast. It shows up overnight and it clears in days.

Right now, in the middle of October, your kids are carrying both. And the fatigue is sitting right on top of the fitness, hiding it.

That’s why a kid can be in the best shape of her life and still run a flat race on a Tuesday dual meet. The fitness is there. You just can’t see it under the tired.

The taper has one job. Let the fatigue drain out while the fitness stays put.

That’s it. A taper doesn’t make anybody fitter. Not in two weeks. Not in any way that matters on Saturday. The hard workout you run five days before the championship doesn’t show up as fitness on race day. It shows up as tired legs on race day.

Remember the construction crew from the sleep episode. Practice delivers the lumber. Sleep is the crew that builds the house. The taper is when you finally stop delivering lumber and let the crew finish the job. And if the crew isn’t on site, the taper just turns into less training.

So what actually changes in those two weeks? Go back to McMaster. The researchers measured everything.

VO2 max didn’t move. Not after any of the three weeks. The engine was the same size every time.

But after the short, fast week, muscle glycogen went up. Total blood volume went up. Strength went up. An enzyme that tells you how well the muscle’s aerobic machinery is working went up.

After the week of rest, that enzyme went down and so did blood volume.

Same engine. More fuel in the tank, more blood in the system, more snap in the legs. That’s a taper.

And look at what the rest week tells you. Doing nothing didn’t protect their fitness. It cost them. The sharpness you built is the first thing to go when you stop using it.

So the goal of a taper isn’t to get fitter. It’s to show up with all the fitness you already built, and none of the tired.

Segment Two · What the Research Actually Says

First, how much does a taper buy you? Inigo Mujika has studied tapering for most of his career. His review of the research puts the usual gain at about three percent. The range runs from half a percent to six.

Three percent doesn’t sound like much. Do the math on a 19 minute 5K. Three percent is 34 seconds. Per runner. Put 34 seconds on your top five and tell me that’s not a different team.

So how do you get it? In 2007, Laurent Bosquet and Mujika pooled 27 taper studies into one analysis. The best results came from a taper that looked like this. About two weeks long. Volume cut by 41 to 60 percent. Intensity kept the same. Frequency kept the same.

A 2023 review that looked only at endurance athletes landed in the same place. Cut the volume 41 to 60 percent. Keep the intensity. Keep the frequency. Time trials got faster. VO2 max and economy didn’t change. Same story as McMaster. Same engine, less tired.

So here are the three rules. Write them on the whiteboard.

Keep the intensity means race pace stays race pace. You cut reps. You don’t cut pace. The McMaster runners who dropped the intensity got six percent. The ones who kept it got 22.

Keep the frequency means the same number of running days. Mujika’s guideline is to cut frequency by no more than about 20 percent. If your kids run six days a week, they run six days a week. Or five. Not three.

And taper by running. In 1994, Joseph Houmard tapered a group of distance runners for a week. The group that kept running, just less of it, got faster over 5K and more economical. The group that swapped to the bike didn’t. Taper by running less, not by running somewhere else.

Now, a coaching note. Those studies are mostly trained adults, a lot of them running big mileage. Your kids aren’t.

So I don’t use 41 to 60 percent. In my periodization guide, my number for high school runners is 30 to 40 percent off season max over the final two weeks.

Here’s why. A 16 year old at 35 miles a week isn’t carrying the fatigue of a college runner at 90. Less fatigue to drain means less to cut. Take 60 percent off 35 miles a week and you’ve got 14. That’s not a taper. That’s the off-season.

Segment Three · Too Little, Too Late

I see the same four mistakes every fall. Sometimes I see all four from the same coach. Sometimes that coach was me.

Mistake one. Too little. The one more workout.

The kid ran flat on Saturday, so Tuesday becomes a test. Or the team looked great last week, so you want to stack one more big session on top of it. I have watched a team run 10 by 400 at mile pace two days before a state meet.

Here’s the problem. Anything hard you do in the last week doesn’t have time to become fitness. It only has time to become fatigue. You’re making a deposit you can’t withdraw until after the season is over.

Mistake two. Too late. The coach who starts cutting on the Monday of race week. Five days isn’t enough to drain six weeks of fatigue, especially on your heaviest-mileage kids. The research landed on about two weeks for a reason. Start the cut two weeks out.

Mistake three. Too much. This is the coach who finally believes in the taper and overdoes it. Three days off before states. Nothing faster than easy for a week. Remember McMaster. The week of rest made them slower. If you take the intensity out, you take the edge with it. Kids come to the line feeling heavy and flat, and you’ll swear the taper didn’t work. It did. You just tapered the wrong thing.

Mistake four. Tapering for everything. A mini-taper every Saturday because every meet feels important. A big invitational in late September. The conference meet. The league meet.

If you taper for every meet, you never build. Fitness needs weeks of uninterrupted work, and you keep interrupting it. In my periodization guide, I put it this way: September training has to look like preparation, not racing.

Pick one meet. The meet that matters. Build the whole season backward from that date. Race through everything else.

And one more thing, because this one catches good coaches. The first few days of a real taper, some kids feel worse. Heavy legs. Restless. Cranky. They think they’re losing fitness. They’re not. Tell them it’s coming before it comes, and you won’t have a kid sneaking in an extra four miles on Wednesday night.

Segment Four · The High School Taper

Here’s the 14 days I’d put in front of a high school team with a Saturday championship. It’s on the transcript page as a table, so you don’t have to write this down while you’re driving.

Start with mileage. The cut isn’t the same for everybody. The kids carrying the most training carry the most fatigue, so they get the biggest cut. Your freshmen at 30 miles a week barely need one.

So using the three levels from my season plan. A rookie whose max week is 30 runs about 24 two weeks out and about 21 in race week, race included. A returner at 40 goes to about 30, then 26. A veteran at 50 goes to about 35, then 30. Rookies end up about 30 percent off their max. Veterans about 40.

Taper mileage targets by athlete level (miles per week)

Now the shape of the two weeks. Same number of running days as always. Keep your Sunday off if that’s your routine.

Two weeks out, you run your normal week with less of everything. Tuesday is your race-pace session with about a third of the reps gone. If they usually run six by a thousand at 5K pace, they run four. Same pace. Thursday is threshold, also cut by a third. Three by eight minutes becomes two. If you race that Saturday, race. If you don’t, the long run gets about 25 percent shorter.

Race week. Monday is easy with strides. Tuesday is the last real session of the season, and it’s short. Three by a thousand at goal 5K pace, full recovery. Two for your rookies. They should finish it feeling like they could do three more.

That’s the point of Tuesday. It isn’t fitness. It’s belief. A kid who just ran goal pace and felt smooth walks into Saturday believing it.

Wednesday easy. Thursday short and easy with a few strides. Friday is a 15 to 20 minute shakeout, walk the course if you can, four strides. Saturday you race.

The 14-day taper for a Saturday championship

Notice what stayed. Race pace. Strides. Running days. Notice what went. Reps, miles, and the long run. Cut the volume. Keep the intensity. Keep the frequency.

Segment Five · Race Week

The plan is the easy part. The hard part is a team of teenagers with extra energy and nothing to spend it on.

So here’s how I bring a whole team to a sharp point.

First, split the roster. Your championship seven taper. Everybody else doesn’t have to. If twelve kids aren’t racing that meet, they can keep training for a JV race or for next year. Two practices, one field. Just don’t let the varsity drift into the JV workout because it looks fun.

Second, protect the three things the taper depends on.

Sleep. The taper is when the crew finally catches up. If a kid is still running six hours a night, the taper just turns into less training. This is the week the phone sleeps in the kitchen.

Fuel. Mileage drops, so some kids eat less. Don’t let them. The body uses that food to refill the tank, and a full tank is a big part of what a taper does. This goes double for your girls. If you haven’t heard the RED-S episode, go back and listen this week.

Routine. Nothing new. No new spikes. No new breakfast. No new warmup. The warmup on Saturday should be the same one they’ve done all season, the one from the warmup episode. Race week is not the time to experiment.

Third, manage the head. Tapering kids get restless. Some feel heavy and panic. Some feel amazing on Wednesday and want to prove it. The hardest workout of race week is the one you don’t let them do.

Give them something to do with that energy. Walk the course. Go over the race plan, the one we built in the race strategy episode. Talk about where the hills are and where they’ll make a move. Let the energy turn into focus instead of miles.

And last, say it out loud. Tell your team on Monday what this week is and why. We’re cutting the miles because the fitness is already built. We’re keeping the speed because we want to be sharp. If your legs feel heavy on Tuesday, that’s normal. Trust the work.

Kids don’t trust a taper they don’t understand. Explain it once, early, and you won’t spend all week defending it.

Segment Six · Monday Morning

Five things you can do this week.

One. Circle the date and count back 14 days. Put the taper on the calendar tonight, in ink. If the championship is two weeks from Saturday, that’s today.

Two. Go through every session left in the season and cut reps, not pace. Six becomes four. Three becomes two. Race pace stays race pace.

Three. Keep the running days. Same number of days as always. No surprise days off to rest up. Rest is what made the McMaster runners slower.

Four. Set a mileage target for every kid on your championship roster. Rookies about 30 percent off their max week. Veterans about 40. The table is on the transcript page.

And five. Tell your athletes on Monday what’s coming. Three sentences. The fitness is already built. We’re cutting miles and keeping speed. If your legs feel heavy this week, that’s normal. Then protect their sleep and their food like it’s part of the workout. Because it is.

Close

Back to McMaster. Nine runners, three different final weeks.

The ones who rested got slower. The ones who kept running easy got a little better. The ones who cut the miles and kept the speed lasted 22 percent longer.

And their VO2 max never moved. Not once. They didn’t get fitter in that last week. They just stopped hiding the fitness they already had.

That’s where your team is right now. September is in the bank. October is in the bank. The work is done. Nothing you add in the next two weeks makes it bigger. A lot of things you add can make it smaller.

So trust it. Cut the volume. Keep the intensity. Keep the frequency. Then get out of the way.

Next week is the season finale. Team culture and the championship mindset, and the Joe Vigil lesson that started this whole show.

I’m Coach Saltmarsh. Cut the miles, keep the edge. Keep it salty, and I’ll see you in the next one.