Taper Plan

So I don’t really do running plans that much.  I mean, I have my own plan in my head of what I’m going to do.  Weekend long run.  A recovery run.  A middle distance run.  Speed work (tempo runs, intervals).  But I don’t follow the big plans since they don’t really fit my schedule and honestly without being remotely competitive in my age group, I don’t think it will matter.  But I do want to taper correctly and while I had a basic taper in place for my last marathon, I wanted to see if I could find anything better.

Instead of one plan, I found three!  They’re all at this great wiki page: http://fellrnr.com/wiki/Main_Page  The thing I like about these plans is they are plans you can apply to your actual training schedule and not a set plan.  The three different concepts are a linear taper, slow exponential taper, and a fast exponential taper.  I plugged it all into a spreadsheet and got this:

DayMileageLT%ES%EF%LTESEF
020100100100202020
10969492000
20918886000
378782796.095.745.53
498377747.476.936.66
567972694.744.324.14
60746864000
71570636010.59.459
80665956000
90615553000
1075752503.993.643.5
1195349474.774.414.23
1264946442.942.762.64
130444342000
140404040000
7960.557.2555.7

My intention is to go with the slow exponential taper.  That’s in between the linear & fast tapers.  I’m really happy to have this…I feel pretty comfortable about using this up to the marathon.


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