Patrick John McCrann | Athlete. Author. Coach.

The growing popularity of running has really changed the way that athletes
plan out their season. Signing up for race can sometimes mean you have to be
ready almost a year in advance! This is a great deal of pressure on people in
terms of how they structure their training.  In most cases giving an athlete
too much time is a really bad idea.  In this post, I would like to give you a few tips on how I advise runners to dial in their fitness in the last few weeks leading up to the big race.

Thinking in Blocks
Sometimes planning a whole season is almost too much to think about at one
time.  This is why I advise athletes to break things down into “blocks.”
Typically these blocks look something like this:

Pre-Season — this block can be as long as needed for people to recover from
the previous race.  Just to keep things simple drop it probably shouldn’t be
any longer than 12 weeks total.  During this time getting back into running
and also beginning to lay the foundation for some really hard work.

In-Season — during this lock your doing really harder works out improving
your face and overall fitness of commercial.  This, my friends, is where the
rubber meets the road.  There’s a lot of really hard work here with
intervals, hill work, and tempo finishes.

Peak — this is really what the final endurance touches on fitness.  Longest
runs happen here during this block. Depending on your final race distance,
you may or may not actually run the full mileage of your goal event.

The Taper
Last but not least, we have the Taper.  This is the most critical part, the one where we take all of the fitness you’ve built and do our best to
fine-tune it for your race day performance.  This is not an easy task.
There’s definitely a reason why anxiety and tension increases as race day
approaches.

A large part of tapering involves resting and managing volume…both individual items related to your body, your training and your race distance. Tapering doesn’t make you faster — training does. Training makes you sharper; and here are three key things to sharpen your run before your next running event.

#3 — Think Frequency not Volume. Every chance to run is another chance to dial in your form and mental focus. If you have 4 hours of running across 4 runs scheduled in your Taper week, why not make it 4 hours in 6 runs? 8 runs?

#2 — Focus on Footspeed. Do strides at the end of every run and really, really work on high turnover and relaxed form. Cadence is one of the first things to “go” when we fatigue.  Using these last few workouts to hammer the high-turnover message home can really make a difference.

#1 — Take A Look At Taper Week Volume, And Do Less. At the end of the day, very few people actually enter race day rested. Sure there are varying degrees of fatigue, but that’s not necessarily as intentional as rest. Next time you have a smaller race, try modifying your taper by cutting out most of the work in the last week save for a few short sharpening runs. My guess is you’ll see a positive change.

What are your final taper preferences?