Are you racing the Two Oceans Marathon and wondering what is the best way to taper for the grueling 56kms that lie ahead in 2 weeks time? If Comrades Marathon is your main goal, do you even need to taper for Two Oceans?

Coach Parry shares his tapering advice specifically for Two Oceans as well as what is best for Comrades training after Two Oceans, on today's episode of Run with Coach Parry.

Tapering for Two Oceans

BRAD
On today's show, we're going to be talking about tapering ahead of the Old Mutual Two Oceans Marathon if you're running Comrades. I've got Lindsey Parry with us, the official Comrades Marathon coach, Lindsey, welcome back.

LINDSEY
Getting into an exciting part of the running year. Two Oceans is one of our premier races and obviously moving into the real meaty training of the Comrades Marathon probably the premier road race in South Africa.

BRAD
We're talking about Two Oceans, but this advice would apply to any one of the ultras and it doesn't matter where you are, obviously, we're talking the South African running scene but if you're running an ultra, and you are training for Comrades, using the ultra as a training run, what's the deal with tapering? Should you taper in the build up to a race like the Old Mutual Two Oceans if you're running Comrades?

LINDSEY
I always want athletes to feel good at Two Oceans. So whether Two Oceans is a training run, whether they're going to push it a little bit this year, because there is a large gap, I suppose it lends itself better to doing that. But I still feel like if you run it hard, it's going to compromise Comrades in a way. But having said that, I would still have a degree of taper which I would decide on how important is Two Oceans to me.

So if Two Oceans is your prime race, then you will spend probably a full to best part of three weeks tapering. So it would be a fairly traditional taper in that sense that, you know, three weeks out, you will have already radically reduced your weekly long run. But you'll still have your week day runs fairly similar. Then from about 10 days out you'd even start to reduce your weekday runs, and then do very little running in the last week going into Two Oceans.

If it's going to be a pure training race for Comrades, you really don't care how you do, you just want to run nice and easy then I would just do the last three days. So the last three days I do very little running, I'd reduce the mileage of the week and adjust the total mileage for the week to pretty close to the average mileage that you've run up to this point, let's say over the last six to eight weeks. What would be better is if you actually look at what am I planning mileage wise in my peak weeks for Comrades? Then you adapt the rest of the run so that your total week, including that 56 k will then be the same total. And I would schedule a rest day for the Sunday.

Then if you want to run a firm or a hard ish Oceans, but Comrades is still the main goal, then I would just have a week long taper. So I literally just have the last week as my taper, very little running, get myself fresh, but not completely chomping at the bit, have a fairly strong run, and in that scenario, and the scenario where Oceans is actually my main race, I would take the following week off. If you've done Two Oceans as a pure training run, then of course the next week, you could probably just treat as a normal recovery week, so that would be at about 70% of your typical weekly mileage, keep all the running easy, and then you go forward from there but if you run it hard, we've raced it, then you take a week off, build up for a week and then you get back into Comrades training.