Race week
Race-week and taper plans, day by day
The work is done. Race-week is about not undoing it. Pick your distance for a day-by-day taper plan — sessions, sleep, carbs, hydration, shakeout, gear list, and race-morning routine.
Marathon (42.2 km)
Full 21-day taper. Carb loading from T-3, last meaningful session T-3, strides T-1, and the race-morning fueling protocol.
Half marathon (21.1 km)
Shorter taper than marathon. Quality + volume drop, but maintain frequency. Carb focus is one big lunch the day before — no multi-day load needed.
Ironman 70.3
Three-sport taper. Brick workouts disappear, swim/bike/run frequency stays. Equipment check, race-morning nutrition timing, transition rehearsal.
Ultra / Trail
Long-race taper. Gear shakeout, drop-bag prep, calorie-per-hour planning, night-running protocol, and pacing the first 20% conservatively.
What a taper is actually doing
Tapering reduces training load while keeping intensity touches alive so your nervous system stays sharp. The peer-reviewed evidence: a properly executed 2–3 week taper before a marathon improves race-day performance by ~3% on average. That's 5–8 minutes off a 4-hour marathon time.
The mistake most self-coached athletes make is to over-rest. Volume should drop 40–60%, but frequency stays the same. You still run 5–6 days a week — they're just shorter. Strides and pace pickups stay in. Long runs shrink and move toward race pace specificity.
The other big mistake is changing things. New shoes, new gels, new pre-race breakfast, new sleep routine. Race week is the worst time to introduce any variable. If you haven't done it in training, don't do it now.
Related tools and reading
Want your taper auto-adjusted to your real readiness?
SportPlan reads your HRV, Body Battery, and load trend during race week — if something is off, the plan adjusts. See your first week before you pay. €9.99/month, cancel anytime.
Methodology designed by Ramon Curto, MSc Exercise Physiology
Ramon Curto designed SportPlan's endurance-training methodology from exercise-physiology principles. SportPlan applies it autonomously to the information you enter and the data you choose to connect; it is not ongoing one-to-one coaching or medical care.
Last revised July 2026
- MSc Exercise Physiology
- Endurance-training methodology
- Connected training-data analysis
- Block periodization · Polarized training