The training is done. Whatever fitness you have, you have. Race week is not the week you get faster — it is the week you find out how good you are at doing nothing, which, if you are the sort of person who signed up for a race, is a skill you have never practised.
Most people ruin it in one of two directions. Either they panic-train, cramming in a last long run on Wednesday because the plan felt too easy and easy feels like cheating. Or they go so completely dormant that by Saturday their legs have the texture of a draught excluder. The right answer sits in a narrow band between the two, and it is well documented.
What the taper is actually for
Cut the volume, keep a little sharpness
A meta-analysis of taper studies by Bosquet and colleagues found the best results came from a two-week taper that cut training volume by roughly 41 to 60 per cent while keeping intensity and frequency broadly intact. Endurance athletes improved by about two per cent on average. Cutting volume harder than 60 per cent made things worse, and cutting the intensity along with the volume wiped out the benefit entirely.
Two per cent does not sound like much until you apply it to a four-hour marathon, where it is about five minutes — the difference between a good day and a story you tell defensively for a year. Fewer miles, then, but the miles you do run should still have some pace in them.
Why you will feel dreadful anyway
Taper madness is real and it is deeply stupid. You will develop a phantom calf injury on Tuesday. It will move to the other calf on Thursday. You will read the race weather forecast eleven times a day, as though staring at it changes the wind direction.
None of it means anything. Sudden aches during a taper are usually your nervous system finally noticing damage it politely ignored for three months. If something genuinely hurts when you walk, that is a different conversation, and a physio is the person to have it with.
The week, roughly
Monday to Wednesday
Short and easy, with one session that reminds your legs what race pace feels like — twenty minutes easy with four or five minutes at goal pace in the middle. It should feel comfortably short. If you finish a race-week run feeling like you achieved something, you did too much.
Thursday and Friday
Twenty to thirty minutes easy, or nothing. Boredom is the enemy here, and boredom is what makes people do a hilly ten-miler on Friday because a friend suggested it. Sort your kit out instead. Lay it on a chair like a small sad scarecrow and photograph it so you stop wondering whether you have it.
Saturday
Fifteen minutes very easy, or nothing, whichever makes you calmer. Then stay off your feet. A day at the expo queueing for free protein bars you will never eat is a very effective way to arrive at Sunday with tired legs. Go, collect your number, leave. And if you have a parkrun habit, this is the one Saturday to jog it or skip it.
Food, and the enormous bowl of pasta
What carb loading actually involves
The traditional ritual is one gigantic plate of spaghetti on Saturday night, eaten with the solemnity of a sacrament. It does very little. Current guidance for events over about ninety minutes suggests 10 to 12 grams of carbohydrate per kilogram of body weight per day across the 36 to 48 hours beforehand — north of 700 grams a day for a 70kg runner. One dinner will not get you there.
Most ordinary runners find that hard to hit, and roughly 8g per kilogram across three days is the realistic version. The part that matters more than the total is keeping fibre low: rice, white bread, potatoes, bananas, honey, jelly sweets. The least virtuous shelf in the supermarket is, this once, the correct one.
Race morning
Eat what you have eaten before your long runs, at the same interval. In a study of recreational runners at the Liverpool and Dublin marathons, 27 per cent reported moderate gut symptoms during the race. Some of that is fixable, and the fix is not experimenting on the morning it counts.
Sleep, and the night you will not get any
You will not sleep well the night before. Around 70 per cent of athletes in one study reported worse sleep than usual before competition, so the majority experience is lying there at 1am doing mental arithmetic about split times. Normal, and survivable.
What helps is banking the night before that: go to bed an hour earlier on Friday, when there is no adrenaline in the way. The evidence that one bad night wrecks endurance performance is thin, and what effect there is seems to land on how hard the effort feels rather than on what your legs can do.
Nothing new on race day
The only race-week rule with no exceptions. The shirt you have never run in will find a way to be wrong at mile nine, and the socks you bought at the expo because they were on offer will introduce you to a blister you did not know your foot had room for.
Which is the argument for race kit that stopped being a decision weeks ago. The Agony running tee wants a few long runs behind it, so by race week it is simply the thing you wear rather than a variable. Same with the Blister running socks, where the seam placement is the part doing the actual work, and the Suffer running shorts if chafing is your particular cross to bear. The rest of the range is here. Wash it all on Wednesday, not Saturday night, when you will discover the tumble dryer has opinions.
Common questions
Should I run at all in race week?
Yes. A full week off is worse than a reduced week. Keep the frequency and intensity, drop the distance — three or four short runs, one with a few minutes at race pace in it.
Is it too late to lose weight before my race?
Yes, and race week is a bad time to try. Restricting food in the days before a long race means arriving with less stored fuel, which is the opposite of what you want. Eat normally, then eat a bit more carbohydrate than normal for the last two days.
I have got a cold on Thursday. Do I still race?
The rough rule of thumb is above or below the neck: a blocked nose is usually fine, a chest infection or a fever is not. If you feel properly unwell, speak to a GP rather than the internet.
How much water should I drink in the days before?
Normal amounts, with attention rather than panic. Drinking litres beyond thirst does not top you up, it introduces you to every toilet between the start pens and mile three. Pale straw is the target.
Should I taper for a half marathon too?
Yes, but a shorter one. Most half marathon plans use around a week, cutting volume while keeping a short sharpener midweek. The full two-week taper is really a marathon thing.
Related reading
If this is your first one, what nobody tells you about your first marathon covers the bits that happen after the start gun. For a realistic sense of the number at the end of it, try how long a half marathon actually takes. And if the thing keeping you up at 1am is the sweeper bus, UK races with the most generous cut-off times should help.
Race week is the week you do less and worry more. That is the deal. Suffer every mile. Still no medals.