Health Publications

Understanding recovery - training for running

Running & FitNews, June, 2001 by Pete Pfitzinger, Scott Douglas

Think "easy" Easier running surfaces will reduce the stress on your legs and back. Look for flat courses to avoid the intensity of uphill running and the muscle damage incurred in downhill running.

A heart monitor is a good tool to prevent you from training too hard on your recovery days. If you keep your heart rate below 75% of maximum, you'll let your body recover, thus allowing quality workouts on hard training days.

Tapering

Training provides the long-term improvements in fitness that are necessary for optimum performance. But training is hard work. A moderate amount of residual fatigue is fine during training, but when a race approaches you will want to increase your recovery so that you will be optimally rested for competition. This balancing of training and optimum recovery leading up to a race is called tapering and there is no doubt that tapering effectively improves performance significantly.

How Long Should You Taper?

Research has shown that tapering effectively improves race performance by 3% to 5%. This means that a good taper can shave 5% off your finish time. When you consider that any one workout will give you less than 1% improvement in fitness, it is wise to err on the side of too long a taper rather than too short a taper. Depending on your race distance you should taper from seven days (for example, 5Ks) to three weeks (for marathons).

How Should You Taper? You need to substantially reduce your mileage while maintaining the intensity of your training. Reducing the amount you run reduces the accumulated fatigue while interspersing high intensity efforts maintains your fitness. How much you reduce your mileage depends on your current training volume and all those variables listed above. A typical pattern for a marathoner is to reduce mileage by 20% to 25% during the third week before the race; 40% during the second week; and 60% during the six days leading up to the race.

Tapering for a marathon--Marathoners can be tempted to run too much in the third week before a marathon because it still seems like a long way off. But if you work too hard during this week, you may find yourself feeling flat with too little time left for an effective taper. On the other hand, planning a steady reduction can create psychological insecurity. The more effective approach to tapering is to intersperse harder efforts within an overall reduction in mileage. A taper in which harder efforts are included every few days will leave you fit, rested, and confident for the marathon.

(Adapted from Advanced Marathoning, by Pete Pfitzinger and Scott Douglas, 2001. Human Kinetics, Champaign, IL, 237 pp. $18.95, available at a discount to The American Running Association members by calling 1-800-7762732 or visit www.americanrunning.org.)