tl;dr I have no idea what I’m doing here.
My Calendar Club project ended 3 weeks out from my first spring race, which is the perfect timing for a peak week. The good news was that I ended that 7 day period feeling strong and injury free despite running 196 miles. The bad news is that I had (have?) no idea how to appropriately taper down from this much volume. Training plans will typically have you dropping weekly mileage by 20-50% per week as you head into your race. Even at the high end of this, I would still be logging a 100 miles which. . . just doesn’t sound like the smart thing to do.
I ended up settling on this:
- 3 weeks out: 67 miles running, 27 miles walking
- 2 weeks out: 65 miles running with 10lb pack, 37 miles walking
- 1 week out: 50 miles running with 10lb pack, 24 miles walking
I was initially targeting 10 more miles three weeks out, but I cut back running while I was on vacation with the wife. Mid-60s weekly mileage is about where I’ve maxed out peak weeks in the past so the fact I’m still hitting this during a taper is pretty heady stuff for me. Even crazier is that it feels rather easy. Adding my pack at race weight was a bit of a struggle at first, but 5 days later I feel stronger than ever as my daily training paces have slowly improved.
This improvement has translated to my walking as well as I’ve now got this pace comfortably below 14 minutes. I’ve been doing a daily double (AM run, PM walk) most days since COVID. I can typically tell what my general fatigue level is based on my afternoon walks. Sub-14 pace is when I’m completely recovered from my training. Sub-15 minute pace means I’m modestly fatigued, but nothing to worry about. Anything above a 15:00 pace though is a flashing warning sign indicating that I’m pushing things too much.
I’m still debating that last week’s mileage as it’s about twice the 25-30 miles that I typically do in the final 7 days before a race. Most of the 50 miles planned is in the early part of the week though and not the last four days. I could probably drop it a back closer to 30 miles, but maybe I don’t need to. One of the goals of the 500 mile March was to get my legs conditioned to massive mileage. If I was successful with that, then I don’t need to taper down my mileage as much as I have in the past. That’s not to say I’m going to go hammer a bunch of workouts during these weeks. Just a lot of chill miles. I’ll probably play it by ear a little bit based on how my legs and body feels.
So far, so good.
Very interesting Phil. I am starting to run 7 miles in the morning and 3 miles walk at the evening . I see the big different for my fitness improvement without depleted. Your high mileage is amazing .
Peter, I’ve found the afternoon walk to be super helpful in my 100 mile endurance. Low risk way to add volume that really pays off later in the races.