marathon taper question

The benefits of resting your legs so your fresh on race day outweigh's the benefits of getting the 2-3 extra weeks of high mileage.

The body is a habit machine though, so, you have to do some amounts of running, workouts, etc,.....which was his question. You want to rest, but trick the body into thinking it's still going through it's normally routines.

Everyone is different, only you know what is too much, or too little which is best learned through trial and error.

Try a decrease of 20% percent of weekly mileage from 3 weeks to 1 from Marathon, then another 10-20% decrease the week of the marathon.

I would suggest:

Last long run be 3 weeks out,

14-16 miles 2 weeks out,

Really hard workout 10 days out,

10-12 miles 7 days out, and...

Last easy/medium workout 4 days out.

I've heard you don't actually reap the benefits from a workout until 4-6 weeks thereafter. During the taper you're mostly maintaining fitness. However while you may not gain any fitness by doing a workout, you could get a feel for a certain pace or gain a mental edge.

It makes sense that different kinds of workouts would have different adaptation responses, since youre stressing different systems. I would guess that your body would gain the results in this order: Quickest from neuromuscular and phosphate system stressed type work, quicker results from other anaerobic type work, then LT followed by aerobic. I'm no exercise physiologist. Thats just what makes sense to me the way most training programs are structured. Hopefully someone with more knowledge in this field can clear this up a bit...

Thanks for the feedback everyone. Looks like my plan is ok. 23 miles 3 weeks out, 17 two weeks out and 13 a week out. I have a 3x1600 workout 11 days prior. Other than that a lot of general and recovery runs with a few more strides thrown in across the last couple weeks. I know there is a lot of figuring things out with the marathon, so should help with the next one.