The Perfect Comrades Marathon taper

The Perfect Comrades Marathon taper

On this edition of the Ask Coach Parry podcast, we have two similar questions. Scott Giles, with just less than a month to go to the Comrades Marathon, and Hermo Terblanche want to know about tapering. Scott asked at this stage, heading into the Comrades Marathon and looking at the taper, should he be tapering as far as distance goes, speed-wise or both. Hermo wanted to know percentage wise for tapering, how much should he cut back in May compared to the mileage he reached in April.

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Brad Brown: On this edition of the Ask Coach Parry podcast, we have two similar questions. Scott Giles, with just less than a month to go to the Comrades Marathon, and Hermo Terblanche want to know about tapering. Scott asked at this stage, heading into the Comrades Marathon and looking at the taper, should he be tapering as far as distance goes, speed-wise or both. Hermo wanted to know percentage wise for tapering, how much should he cut back in May compared to the mileage he reached in April.

Lindsey Parry:  So I split the taper which are the four weeks that are coming up, I split the taper into two, two week blocks. So the first two weeks being the week that’s coming now, we’re on Tuesday, would be to keep my midweek exactly the same, untouched, very similar in terms of speed work or whatever else you’ve been doing, and I would have my long runs be quite a bit shorter.

Final month Comrades Marathon preparation

It’s hard to give a number because it depends what sort of training you have been doing, but I would say that your, not your long-long run, or Comrades long run as it’s now termed, but your stock standard long run that you normally run, let’s say it’s 36km, then this weekend coming you’ll want to do that run at about 80% of what you normally, of that 36km training run.

Then you go into week two, which is three weeks out from race day and then I would cut that long run, so again, I keep my midweek stuff the same, I do all the same training as I always do and I then cut my long run by another 25%. In other words I do 75% of what it was the week before.

Final two weeks before the Comrades Marathon

Then when I move into two weeks from race day, I would cut all my runs down to 75% of what I did the week before. That includes your speed work, everything including your long run and then in the final week you will do very little.

I still like people to train and do a little bit of running on each day of the week, but your sessions shouldn’t really be longer than 40 minutes at the start of the week and as you get closer to race day, they shouldn’t be longer than 15 minutes.

BB: Brilliant, and I’m sure we’re going to be chatting lots more about tapering over the next few weeks as we head towards the Comrades Marathon 2015, Scott and Hermo, thank you very much for your questions. Don’t forget as well, if you’d like to get yours submitted, all you have to do is head over to our website, askcoachparry.com, we’re back again tomorrow. From myself, Brad Brown and Lindsey Parry, it’s cheers.

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