Tapering: how do you handle it?

I don't taper I just usually stop running the day before and run it the next day and then take some days off and run the next one. Tapering is pointless and I learned that long ago. Of course when you have a string of races like a Half Marathon every weekend for three weeks you learn tapering isn't important. Gotta love Road Racing.

Usually though I keep my long run within atleast a week apart from the race though.

Tapering makes me feel like superman. I have so much energy that I have to force myself not to run that much. It also makes me very irritable and nervous. The good effects are that it helps you to repair all of your muscles and fill your stores of glycogen. When your legs feel very springy and energetic you know you're there. The bad thing is that some people use all of this energy that you don't feel during your daily training to go out too fast in the first half of the race. In one of my marathons my goal was 6:50 per mile and I ran the first 13 in 6:20. Needless to say I finished the entire race slower than 6:50 on average. Good Luck.

I masturbate a lot

I've tried lots of different kinds of tapering, sometimes deliberately and other times by accident. Most of my best races have come after HUGE tapers. My half marathon PR (1:10:13) came after 10 days almost completely off due to a adductor injury and then a couple of days of 3-4 mile runs just to dust off the legs. Strange but true. My shorter race PR's, such as the mile, came without tapering. In fact, they were run on pretty tired legs. So maybe, tapering helps you in longer races, but not in shorter races.

For a 2 week taper I usually feel worse the 1st week and then better starting in the 2nd and good to go a few days before. It normal....that's why they call it taper madness....

The fitness of the marathon runner is extraordinary, and it therefore demands extraordinary things from the person who possesses it. Can you take a body that is brimming with strength and ride it delicately to utter exhaustion? Can you turn its strength against itself, use that strength surgically and witheringly to destroy that self-same body? You have to be singularly mad to perform such a task. The sane try to preserve themselves. The mad destroy themselves. It is not sane to reach for total exhaustion, but it's what singularity demands.

And so, the week before a marathon, one gives oneself the task of becoming quite mad.

http://thelogicoflongdistance.blogspot.com/2010/10/anticipation.html

Ha! I like that quote. Except it doesn't necessarily have to apply solely to the marathon. It can apply to any distance race 800m or over.