Tapering’ is a term used in endurance sports and basically means reducing an athlete’s training load before a big race. Both personal experience and scientific research have concluded that a mandatory rest period before the race significantly increases the athlete’s fitness level and increases his performance by an average of 3%. For marathon runners, three percent boils down to being 5 to 10 minutes faster than the race distance.
When asked about the secret to her success, triple Olympic speed skating champion Yvonne Van Gennep commented, “There’s no secret. It all comes down to training hard and then putting on the handbrake.” Van Gennep could not have given a better or clearer explanation, as this allegorical ‘handbrake’ is precisely what narrowing is all about. The term ‘taper down’ was coined in 1947 by Australian Olympic swimming coach Forbes Carlile and physiology professor Frank Cotton, who found that their swimmers performed much better when they eased their training in the last three weeks before competition. It was much later that this discovery was also used in other endurance sports like running.
The biochemical explanation for taper is that by resting, the body can recover from the impact of weeks and months of hard training and therefore have the best chance of reaching peak racing performance. The intense training undertaken by the athlete prior to the race has largely attacked and depleted his body’s stores of enzymes, glycogen, and hormones, as well as impairing the natural resistance or “spring” of his legs by causing subtle muscle damage. Tapering allows the body to replenish all these reserves and repair your muscle tissues so you can cross the starting line fully recovered and in optimal shape.
For runners, a taper period can last between 10 and 21 days, often depending on the length of the next race: the longer the race, the longer the taper. During this period, the runner should decrease their weekly mileage by between 30% and 85%. Although some suggest a gradual decrease in training volume, a 1999 scientific study showed that during a 14-day taper there is a rapid decrease in mileage of 50% during the first three days, followed by 75% in the next three days and continued by a steady decline. The decline in the last eight days resulted in the best performance in the race. It was also shown that, contrary to popular belief, running during the taper period should be done at high intensities. Intervals at 5K race pace and fast paced runs are recommended.
Runners often avoid the taper period because they fear losing fitness. That this is an unfounded and unfounded fear is shown by the countless examples of great athletic success after a period of no training. Often these rest periods were not chosen voluntarily, but rather forced by external circumstances. An example is the case of Carlos Lopes, who won the 1984 Olympic marathon after an accident prevented him from running for the last 10 days before the event. Joan Benoit won the 1984 US Olympic Marathon Trial after knee surgery forced her to cut back on her training just before the race. She attributed her victory primarily to the fact that the surgery had forced her to train less. She later went on to grab the gold medal in the first women’s Olympic marathon. Another proof of the tapering formula is the story of how the immortal Czech runner Emil Zatopek became the 1950 European champion in the 5,000 and 10,000 metres. Just two days before the event, he was released from the hospital after an illness forced him to spend two full weeks there, preventing him from doing any training. And Roger Bannister only managed to break the elusive four-minute mile barrier and set the world record for that distance after spending a week rock climbing in Scotland in which he hadn’t run.
The obvious conclusion is that resting before competition is a must for any athlete who wants to perform at their best. It seems strange that a large number of athletes continue to overlook this very tried and tested strategy. However, less is more, both in life and in sport.