What It Takes to Beat Marathon Taper Madness

For many runners training for a marathon, the hardest part of training is actually the part that, on paper, should be the easiest: The taper. 

“Tapering” refers to the two- to three-week period between a final long run and race day. It’s a time to let your legs, your mind and your psyche rest after months of abuse. Put another way, it’s a time to heal, and stay healthy. before you hit the starting line. 

Why, then, do so many runners experience taper madness? 

For starters, it just feels weird. After running 40, 50 or 60-plus miles per week, we’re suddenly scaling back. We know, understand and readily accept why we’re doing it, but that doesn’t mean we like it. 

In addition, with less time to focus on training, our minds start to wander. Millions of things could potentially derail a two-mile jog around the neighborhood. Run 26.2 miles and you’re talking trillions of possibilities: Dehydration, pulled muscles, bloody nipples, wrong turns and a shortage of bagels and peanut butter at the finish line. It's even worse if you're running your first big race.

Finally, there’s the anticipation. Months of training, dedication and focus all hinge on an experience that will last anywhere from a little more than five hours to less than three hours. It’s a lot of pressure to put on yourself during the final countdown to race day. 

Conquering taper madness isn’t easy. That said, I’ve actually been pretty blase over the last three weeks. Going to two conferences for the day job, picking up extra shifts at the night job, and attending a wedding and engagement party in one evening have luckily kept my mind well occupied. (Plus, as I’ve noted a few times by now, I bonked horribly in my last marathon and know that I’ve done just about everything I can to make sure I don’t do it again.) 

Maintaining your sanity during a marathon training taper ultimately comes down to a few key steps: 

Keep yourself busy. Go to that movie, museum exhibit or show you’ve been meaning to see. Catch up on your DVR. Call your mother. Do some yardwork. 

Stay healthy. Retain the good eating habits that powered you through marathon training. Sleep. Avoid alcohol. (Unless you have a wedding and engagement party in the same night. In that case, celebrate, but drink lots of water and take some ibuprofen / aspirin before bed.) Don’t do dumb things that could result in bodily harm.

Trust your training. You made it, right? And even if you didn’t, you can’t go back in time. What’s done is done. 

Don’t overthink your outfit. Just pretend you’re packing running clothes for a few days and you’ll be fine. Seriously, though: Pack the clothes you like the most. Don’t worry about getting all matchy-matchy -- your clothes will be so absolutely disgusting by mile 15 that no one will notice if the trim on your shirt matches your shoes. 

Check the weather and, if necessary, adjust your goal. Remember, you’re most likely to achieve your goal when it’s 60 degrees, overcast and calm. Even the slightest hint of inclement weather will adversely affect your time. If you know this going in, you can adjust your pace accordingly and reduce the likelihood of both bonking and disappointing yourself. Aside from my PR race, I’m most proud of the marathon I ran in the snow -- I knew my pace would be off, so I dialed back and ended up coming as close to a negative split as I ever have.

It’s easy to drive yourself crazy during a taper, but it’s also easy to shift a bit of focus away from your marathon and back to the things you had to give up when your training was at its worst. You can’t forget the big race altogether -- nor should you -- but you can make sure it doesn’t take over your life.

13 Tips For Your First Road Race

A colleague recently asked a couple folks on Twitter for some advice about preparing for his first 5K. I suggested that he not think too much about it. 

As it turns out, there is a lot to think about before your first road race. After all, it’s your indoctrination into the Cult of Running, and it’s human nature to not want to be That Guy, whether you’re standing in the wrong spot, wearing the wrong shirt or hitting the wall less than a mile into the race. 

To avoid embarrassment, real or otherwise, here’s a few things you should do. 

Stick to what you know. Now’s not the time to try something new. Wear clothes, including shoes and socks, that are comfortable and familiar to you. If you eat, make it the same light breakfast you usually have. (If you’re a bacon-and-eggs type, save that for post-race brunch.) If you drink anything, make it water or your sports beverage of choice. Coffee is OK in limited quantities. Don’t drink a ton, though, unless, you know, you like waiting in line for Port-a-Pottys. 

Plan, plan and plan some more. Give yourself plenty of time to get to the starting line. Research your parking options and try to find a spot convenient to bib pickup, the starting line and the finish line.(If you’re lucky, all three are in the same spot.) Plug the race address into your phone and review the directions the night before, as you may wake up so early that you're incapable of rational thought. 

Leave early. I like to leave my house such that I’ll arrive an hour before a race, perhaps earlier if it’s a long race, a race I’ve never done before or a race where I expect a lot of traffic. If I’m early, I’ll just sit in the car and kick out the jams for a bit. 

That said, stay loose. You don’t need to jog for half an hour, but you shouldn’t sit in your car until two minutes before the gun goes off. Walk around a bit. Take a swig or two of water. Do some dynamic stretches, such as squats or lunges, to get your blood flowing. (This has the added effect of psyching people out.) Don’t head to the starting line until it’s about 10-15 minutes before gun time. 

On the line, breathe. There will be a lot going on. People pose for pictures. People look for friends. People violate your personal space. People pose for more pictures. Do your best to ignore it all. 

Don't stand up front. Unless you plan to win, you wore the greatest costume ever or you personally know the race director, you can stand back with the hoi polloi. Larger races will use corrals that put faster runners up front and increasingly slower runners further back. Look for signs that mention a specific pace per mile, find the corral that best fits your pace and make some friends. 

Don't take off like a bat outta hell. It's hard to avoid starting too fast. I've been running for 18 years and I still do it myself. About 95 percent of the time, I regret it. You will, too. Keep breathing, stick with the pack around you (you made friends, right?) and remember that the thundering herd will quickly thin out. 

Push yourself, but not too hard. I know, it’s like saying, “Take your time, but hurry up.” Presumably, you signed up for this race in part to see what you’re made of. You should be going faster than you did on your training runs. Don’t hold back, and you’ll surprise yourself. That said, it’s your first race, so be careful. At any sign of non-routine discomfort (that is, anything that’s not the usual soreness or tightness that all runners feel), dial it back a bit. 

Don’t worry about hydration. Unless it’s obscenely hot out, you’re probably not going to need to drink water during the course of a 5K. If you do, one little cup will suffice. (Obviously, this will be different for longer races, but for now you’ll be fine.) Anything more and it’s gonna slosh around in your stomach. 

Enjoy yourself. Odds are you’ve never had people cheering you on. Soak it all in. Use that to push you if you start getting tired, sore or cranky. Once you cross the finish line, make the most of the post-race festivities (especially the food). Rehydrate. Find the friends you made, or the friends you already have, and cheer them on as they cross the line. Make plans to run together again. 

Stretch. You don’t have to do this at the race itself -- though if you’re feeling tight, you probably should. But at some point during the day, take a few minutes to stretch. Remember, you’ve never run this fast, so you owe it to your legs to treat them right. (You’ll probably want to stretch the day after the race as well.) 

Treat yourself, albeit within reason. I usually grab coffee and breakfast on the way home. You should, too. And it’s more fun with friends. If it’s the right time of year, you could always get ice cream. 

Oh, one final thing: The race T-shirt is like the concert T-shirt. Don’t wear the race T-shirt during the race itself. Amateur. But if you need to change after the race, the race T-shirt is acceptable. Plus, it’s a silent way of explaining to the folks in the coffee shop why you smell so bad.

Looking Back on My First Marathon

With my ninth marathon, Smuttynose Rockfest, rapidly approaching, and with many preparing to embark on fall marathon adventures, I thought I’d partake in an equally humorous and cathartic exercise and relive the calamity of my first marathon. 

I was a 21-year-old college junior when I toed the line at the BayState Marathon in October 2001. My longest training run had been 18 miles, and that hadn’t been planned -- I managed to get lost in the vicinity of Jamaica Pond and inadvertently add a couple miles to my planned route. (Aside: How the hell did we map out long runs back then? I’m pretty sure I just guessed.) 

My goal, of course, was to finish in 3:10 and qualify for the Boston Marathon. I’d written “3:10 or Bust” on a sticky note that I’d taped to the wall next to class/work schedule. Naturally, I knew nothing about proper marathon training, cross-training, eating or recovery -- though I did have enough sense to write “avoid beer” in my planner in the three weeks leading up to the race. (Yes, I was legal. And no, I didn’t take my own advice.) I was so poorly prepared that I never wore a watch and didn’t think to actually get one until the day before the race, for $7, at my local Walmart. (Hey, I was on a college student budget.) 

I started the race well and maintained a BQ-ready 7:10 pace for at least the first 13.1 miles and, perhaps, longer. (It was 12 years ago, after all. The memory’s foggy) Around the 16-mile mark, though, my legs turned to jelly. I collapsed into a telephone pole, clung to it for dear life, and began the humiliating 10-mile, 90-odd-minute Walk/Jog of Shame to the finish. 

I crossed in 3:22 and change, collapsed on the ground, napped on the futon at my parent’s house and hobbled around campus for a couple days. (I did at least stretch once I’d returned to my Boston apartment that night. Otherwise I very well may still be on the futon at my parent’s house.) 

For a variety of reasons, I didn’t do my second marathon -- also BayState -- until 2006. That one didn’t go as planned, either. I came down with a wonderful bout of runner’s knee the month before, missed my last week of real training and the first week of my taper, and went into the race with no real goal of any kind. Finishing around 3:33 was a blessing as far as I was concerned.

Both races taught me a lot.

• You need a real training plan, and you need to do your damndest to stick to it. 
• You need to set a realistic goal. Especially if, you know, you’ve never run a marathon before. 
• As I was painfully reminded of this in my eighth and, to this date, worst marathon, sometimes it’s better to be smart than fast. Especially if, you know, training hasn’t gone as planned.
• Training for and running a marathon is freakin’ hard. In 2001, my roommates thought I was nuts. (To their credit, they were genuinely concerned about my tardiness on the day of my sojourn to Jamaica Plain.) Today, my wife thinks I’m nuts. (Well, marathon training is only part of it, I suppose. And, in buying compression socks for my birthday, she enabled me.) 
• Most importantly, no matter how badly you bonk, no matter what fluids emanate from your body, no matter what hitherto undiscovered muscles ache, nothing feels more satisfying that running, jogging, stepping, hobbling or crawling across the finish line of a marathon. 

Have fun this fall, everyone. Remember: Even if you miss your time goal, fail to qualify for Boston or get a swanky age group prize, you’re still doing something that the vast majority of the population doesn’t have the intestinal or testicular/ovarian fortitude to even start, let alone finish. 

If nothing else, you will finally get to eat and drink whatever the hell you damn well please, with no fear of consequence, for a few days at least. (Until you start training again, of course.) And a futon in your parent’s basement will suddenly become the most comfortable bed in the world.

Remembering My Running Anniversary

Generally speaking, August is a stupid month. Sure, some awesome people have birthdays, but August is pretty much a longer, warmer, Monday-holiday-less version of February.

That said, I do look forward to the end of August, as it's my running anniversary. It was at this point 18 years ago, right before my freshman year of high school, that I started running.

I was always an active kid. I played Little League baseball, youth basketball and lots of pickup football. (I failed to hono[u]r my father's Canadian heritage and never tried hockey.) But puberty robbed me of what shred of coordination I possessed.

On top of that, I was starting at a new school. I went to public schools until fourth grade, when I a) discovered sarcasm and b) got bored. My parents thought a Catholic school might help, so I went to one for middle school. (It didn't. I emerged more sarcastic, largely agnostic and still bored.)

A couple weeks before the beginning of school (which in New England is around Labor Day), the local paper ran an ad listing the dates and times of fall sports tryouts. I wanted to do something, but I hated playing soccer, was way too small for real tackle football and had never tried whatever were the other fall sports. (Hey, it was 18 years ago. I don't remember.)

Then I saw cross country. "How hard can that be?" I wondered. I also that no one ever got cut from cross country teams. Done.

I showed up the first day of practice in high-top basketball shoes and knit shirts. It took me at least 45 minutes to cover the 5K course, and I stopped several times. Needless to say, I wasn't really cut out for running.

But I persisted. After all, I'm stubborn and competitive. (Those plus sarcasm are a mighty mix.) Plus, once I finally invested in running gear and stopped finishing dead last, I kinda liked it.

Now, I never imagined I’d still be running 18 years later. After high school, I went to a small, urban liberal arts college that would have been Division IV in athletics if there were such a thing. The urban part, though, made running easier, not to mention fun, and aside from a preventable bout with runner’s knee after my freshman year -- the cause? Insufficient stretching -- I haven’t taking more than a couple weeks off running since I took my first uncomfortable, basketball-shoe-clad strides in August 1995. 

I’ve detailed the stages of my running career before, so I won’t rehash them here. I’ll only add one thing: Despite the soreness, the chafing, the loads of laundry and the smartass kids shouting, “Run, Forrest!” I have no regrets. None. And every year, in the last week of August, I remember why.

For Speed Work to Succeed, You Need the Will to Run Through the Pain

As marathon training has progressed in earnest, I’ve been reintroduced to the funtasticness that is the speed workout. Aside from the occasional fartlek, I hadn’t done legitimate speed work since college and hadn’t set foot on a track since high school. 

I never really liked speed work. Anything shorter than a mile felt like a sprint, and, let’s face it, I wasn’t a sprinter. I spent most of my time toward the back of the pack, simultaneously marveling at the speed that my teammates had and cursing them for it. 

These days, speed work feels much different. It’s a solitary activity, as I’m not on a team, so I am only running against the clock. It’s also specifically targeted to a race goal -- a 3:10 marathon -- not to going balls to the wall and/or impressing the girls’ team as much as possible. 

The targeted times of Run Less, Run Faster help, as they make it easy (in theory, at least) to set a pace, stick with it and maintain it over the course of a workout. But they still make you hurt -- and it’s a different sort of hurt than grinding out the last miles of a long run or hitting the pace goal of a tempo run. 

Track workouts hurts because they beat you up from the first interval and don’t stop. Your legs continue to burn with each rep, and it becomes harder and harder to hit that goal time. 

This leaves you with two choices. One is to stop, to say you did all that you could, scrape what remains of your pride off the track, and stumble home with your tail between your legs. The other choice is to reach down, deep within yourself, and finish the damn workout. 

(Yes, this song is longer than some track workouts. It’s also awesome. So there.) 

I’d be lying if I said this was easy. I’d also be a hypocrite if I neglected to mention that I’ve been guilty of taking my foot off the accelerator this summer. “Who cares if my sixth 800 is a few seconds off,” I told my sweat-covered self, “if my first five 800s were all within one second of my goal pace?” 

Here’s the thing: The pain goes away. If your cooldown is slow enough and long enough -- mine is close to 1.75 miles, or the distance from the track to my house -- you’ll feel fine by the time you get home. Stretch and foam roll later on, and you won’t even be sore when you go to bed. 

But the next time you step onto the track, you’ll remember that you do, in fact, have enough in you to throw the hammer down for the entire workout. And when you step to the line for your next race, you’ll be that much more prepared than the folks in the crowd around you.

Sometimes, You Gotta Let the D-Bag Drivers Win

I made the mistake of running during Monday morning rush hour this week. In a span of 20 minutes, distracted drivers narrowly avoided hitting me five separate times. (A sixth such driver was shaving at a red light. Luckily, he was on the other side of the street.) 

One driver readily admitted, after I yelled “Pay attention!” at his open window, that he didn’t see me. Another was too busy munching on a breakfast bar to acknowledge that he didn’t see me and probably still hasn’t seen me, a day and a half later. The others were making right turns and neglected to look for pedestrians in the crosswalk before inching forward. 

At first, I was mad as hell. I’m still mad, mind you, but I’ve come to a Zen sort of conclusion. (It won’t sound Zen at first, but trust me.) 

People are douchebags. People are also morons. Yelling at them while they are driving and not respecting your right to share the road with them isn’t going to suddenly turn them into MIT-bound saints. It’ll probably just piss them off -- or, if they really are morons, confuse them. 

Instead, do what I did in the remaining few miles of my run this week: Pause. Make sure the driver sees you. If he or she lets you go, give ‘em a friendly wave. If not, put your head down, curse to yourself (not to them) and use the adrenaline burst to make up the whole five seconds of time you have lost. 

By waiting for cars, even when we’re on crosswalks, are we letting the douchebags win? I suppose. But are battle scars from a fight on the side of the road or, worse, months in a wheelchair after a car accident really worth proving a point? Runners, by their very nature, are stubborn people -- but we also all have partners, spouses, pets, children, jobs and friends to come home to. 

Earlier this summer, I said no run is worth a trip to the hospital. The context then was running in the heat and humidity. The context now is different, but the message is the same. Sometimes, even when you’re right, it’s not worth fighting -- especially if it’s a fight you’re pretty much guaranteed to lose.

How Running Makes Me a Better Person

I’ve been running for almost 18 years, and I can’t imagine what my life would be like if I wasn’t a runner. 

There are a few things that might be better. My wallet, for example, freed from the annual burden of buying three pairs of sneakers, several race entries and, most recently, tubs of Generation UCAN, would be considerably lighter. I’d also launder my clothes far less frequently and be able to get away with using bath towels more than once. I’d actually get to sleep in on Sunday mornings, too. 

But, let’s face it, running makes me a better person. There are many reasons why, but these are the ones that come to mind first. 

I’m hearty. Regular exercise gives you more energy, strengthens your immune systems and makes you less prone to the colds and flus that knock most everyone else down. I get a cold once or twice a year, but that’s it. And they never last more than a couple days. (Everyone hates me.) 

I’m confident. Twenty mile marathon training runs suck, and in the hours that follow, I often find myself questioning the majority of my life decisions. But the next day -- or, let’s be honest, two days later, since I’m not getting any younger -- I’m proud of what I’ve done. This pride seeps into other facets of life, too, and it makes me realize that I’m perfectly capable of taking on tough tasks at work, at home and in life. It may hurt, but I’ll power through. 

I eat as much as a small nation in the South Pacific. Yes, this lightens the wallet, and yes, I stick to a pretty healthy diet as it is, but it’s nice to know that I can enjoy free pizza or cake at work and not feel guilty about it. (Did I mention that everyone hates me?) 

I can handle adversity. I can probably count on one hand the number of perfect races I’ve had in my life. In all the rest, one, two or 1,002 things have gone wrong. But I’ve finished every race, no matter how much it hurt or how embarrassing my finishing time would be. So, when I get stuck at work late, or traffic sucks, or I spill my coffee before even taking a single sip, or the stupid raspberries in my stupid backyard scratch my stupid arms, I can shrug it off without getting stressed, panicked or otherwise freaked out. 

I never pay for T-shirts. Road race shirts are great conversation starters, too. 

I know my body well. Run long enough and you start to tell the difference between a tight muscle (which you can relieve by walking it off or stretching), a sore muscle (which you can relieve by resting) and an injured muscle (which you need help fixing). You can also tell the difference between being fatigued, exhausted and worn down to the point that you need a day off. I’ve been lucky enough to avoid injury in my running career, and a big part of the reason is knowing the difference between good pain (which builds a foundation for better, faster, stronger running) and serious pain. 

 

I have great friends. Runners are genuinely awesome people -- often humble, occasionally snarky, incredibly supportive and always welcoming. When I’m down, they cheer me up. When I have a bad workout, they encourage and motivate me. I gladly do the same for them, too. (I only hope I return the favor as well as they stick up for me.) 

I definitely have bad runs, bad workouts and bad races, but these seven reasons -- along with others I can’t quite articulate -- clearly illustrate why running makes me a better person and why I will never, ever regret taking up this sport. 

Running makes all of us better people. How has it changed your life?