What are your philosophies on in-season tapering?

Is it better to maintain summer peak mileage for a while or reduce it once racing season starts?

This is a good question. I'd like to hear some answers.

Take summer off and build in the fall

I think a popular philosophy these days is to maintain a high level of fitness year round and always be 3-5 weeks away from peak racing fitness.

Getting back to your original question...it depends.

A 4 month buildup to a marathon would not be a good place for a traditional taper with reduced mileage.

A 1500m athlete who is in great shape in early spring and may need a qualifying standard before championship season could greatly benefit from a midseason taper and quick PR. It would be a big confidence boost and physically allow for another buildup for a true late season peak.

I know that when I have run peak mileage and then dropped at the beginning of the season, I feel burnt out and like trash at the end of the season. This season I'm holding 90-100 percent of peak mileage until 2-3 weeks out of championship season.

However, I cannot give valuable inputs to the #2 approach, because I did not rebuild after stopping for intensity as you described.

I'm going to vote for #1 as the better option, only because some of the principles of #2 I feel have led to burnouts (ineffective tapers)

hart crane wrote:

I think a popular philosophy these days is to maintain a high level of fitness year round and always be 3-5 weeks away from peak racing fitness.

Getting back to your original question...it depends.

A 4 month buildup to a marathon would not be a good place for a traditional taper with reduced mileage.

A 1500m athlete who is in great shape in early spring and may need a qualifying standard before championship season could greatly benefit from a midseason taper and quick PR. It would be a big confidence boost and physically allow for another buildup for a true late season peak.

How about a 5K runner with a solid base, with a month at 70 mpw?

With high school kids, i would prefer to see 50 miles a week year round with different stimuli added and removed rather than a few weeks in August at 80 mpw and a bunch of 20mpw scattered throughout the year.

It's okay for even the average high school kid to run 8 or 9 miles easy the day before a dual meet as opposed to 20 minutes jog and 4 striders.

taperworm wrote:

hart crane wrote:

I think a popular philosophy these days is to maintain a high level of fitness year round and always be 3-5 weeks away from peak racing fitness.

Getting back to your original question...it depends.

A 4 month buildup to a marathon would not be a good place for a traditional taper with reduced mileage.

A 1500m athlete who is in great shape in early spring and may need a qualifying standard before championship season could greatly benefit from a midseason taper and quick PR. It would be a big confidence boost and physically allow for another buildup for a true late season peak.

How about a 5K runner with a solid base, with a month at 70 mpw?

No need to drop the mileage. If you double maybe sleep in a bit and cut the morning run a day or two in the week leading up to race.

The idea is to replace a tempo or threshold workout with an easier run that may just touch on a stimuli like that. So instead of a 40 minute tempo workout on Tuesday, do a 10 minute random fartlek during a nice 40 minute run.

Bump

I know of a few top, national-class programs that follow some form of Option 1 (maintaining mileage, training through local races, and not 'tapering' until NXR and NXN races). That said, I personally liked doing period 'micro-tapers' for some of our bigger throughout the season coupled with some 'micro-builds' in mileage.

While the more experienced programs may feel pretty confident in how to navigate the taper, I think it's always a risky proposition to bank on knowing how the teenage body will handle a single, big taper at the end of a long season.

I currently coach at the Division 1 level (NCAA bubble team) and hopefully can give some answers.

Prior to coming on to this program, the team slowly cranked up mileage over the summer, went through a period in-season where they went "up week" and then "down week" to account for racing, with a progressive drop in mileage about 4 weeks out until by the end of the 4th week (conference champs) you are at about 50%.

This was not getting good results and many athletes felt strong in September and tanked October into November. I am not a big fan of sharp drops in mileage whether it comes on progressively or not. Especially if it too far out from target races. My experiences as an athlete and witnessing other coach's protocols for their teams have left me the impression that it makes you generally stale.

So, what I did instead when I got on staff was do a slow summer build up to stay healthy and STAY in high mileage the whole season. We did have down weeks and they typically went 3 weeks UP, 1 week DOWN, with some athletes going 2 UP, 1 Down.

We went to 80% of your mileage the week before conference, and then 70% of your mileage the week of conference. Back to 80% the week after that, and then back down to 70% for regionals. If we have NCAA individual qualifying or team qualifying I still do 70% again.

So yeah. It is not a big taper and when it does happen you have a bump up in between the two meets you are preparing for. You have to come to grips with the fact that all other races don't matter in our sport and you train through them even if you are tired. If you can balance that with recovery, the pay-off come championship time is huge.

Honestly, I think tapering doesn't really help THAT much. There isn't so much you can do at that point to get faster but there is a lot you can do to f**k everything up by changing things too drastically and making yourself stale. That's why we push through most of the season....to stay consistent.

Bumping this... Also if you do the 80% conference 70% regionals or whatever your 2 big championship meets are where does the loss in mileage occur? The long run... 20% of all runs...get rid of morning doubles? I am high school and do 50-55 a week with a 12-15 long run.