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:
| Day | Mileage | LT% | ES% | EF% | LT | ES | EF |
| 0 | 20 | 100 | 100 | 100 | 20 | 20 | 20 |
| 1 | 0 | 96 | 94 | 92 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2 | 0 | 91 | 88 | 86 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 3 | 7 | 87 | 82 | 79 | 6.09 | 5.74 | 5.53 |
| 4 | 9 | 83 | 77 | 74 | 7.47 | 6.93 | 6.66 |
| 5 | 6 | 79 | 72 | 69 | 4.74 | 4.32 | 4.14 |
| 6 | 0 | 74 | 68 | 64 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 7 | 15 | 70 | 63 | 60 | 10.5 | 9.45 | 9 |
| 8 | 0 | 66 | 59 | 56 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 9 | 0 | 61 | 55 | 53 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 10 | 7 | 57 | 52 | 50 | 3.99 | 3.64 | 3.5 |
| 11 | 9 | 53 | 49 | 47 | 4.77 | 4.41 | 4.23 |
| 12 | 6 | 49 | 46 | 44 | 2.94 | 2.76 | 2.64 |
| 13 | 0 | 44 | 43 | 42 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 14 | 0 | 40 | 40 | 40 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 79 | 60.5 | 57.25 | 55.7 |
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.
