How to Taper for an Ultra: A Three-Week Protocol

The taper is the only part of a training block where doing less is the skill. It is also the part where more races are quietly damaged than any other, usually by runners who spent sixteen weeks being disciplined and then panicked in the last ten days.

Here is the thing to internalise before anything else: three weeks out, your fitness is set. The adaptations from a hard session take days to weeks to consolidate. Nothing you do in the final fortnight will make you fitter. Everything you do can make you tireder.

How long should the taper be?

Scale it to how much the event will cost you and how much fatigue you have accumulated.

Two variables shift these. Older runners and runners with high accumulated fatigue generally need a slightly longer, deeper taper. Runners on low volume - under about 50 km a week - need less, because there is less fatigue to shed and more risk of detraining.

The rule: volume down, intensity kept

This is the finding that surprises people. Studies on tapering across endurance sports consistently show the best outcomes come from a substantial reduction in volume while maintaining or even slightly increasing training intensity, with frequency held roughly constant.

In practice:

• Volume: cut hard. This is where the freshness comes from.
• Intensity: keep a small amount of genuinely fast running in each taper week. Short, sharp, well recovered.
• Frequency: keep running most days. Two days completely off in a row during taper week makes most runners feel worse, not better.

The runner who spends the last two weeks jogging slowly every day arrives at the start line flat, heavy, and inexplicably sluggish. That flatness is not fatigue - it is the absence of any recent neuromuscular stimulus.

The three weeks, in detail

Assume a peak week of 80 km with 3,000 m of gain, three weeks out from a 100K.

Week -3: unload the volume

• Volume: about 60 km, gain about 2,000 m.
• Long run: 3:00, easy, on race-like terrain. This is your last meaningful long run.
• Intensity: one session - 4 x 6 minutes at threshold on a climb. Shorter than your build sessions, same effort.
• Strength: both sessions, reduce a set per exercise.
• Everything else: easy.

This week should still feel like training. You are removing volume, not stopping.

Week -2: sharpen

• Volume: about 45 km, gain about 1,200 m.
• Long run: 1:45-2:00, easy, with 20 minutes at race effort in the middle.
• Intensity: one session - 5-6 x 2 minutes at hard-but-controlled effort, full recovery. Short and fast.
• Strength: one session, light, no eccentric work.
• Full dress rehearsal: run the long run in your race shoes, race vest, with your race fuel. This is the last chance to discover the vest chafes.

Around now the phantom injuries start. A knee twinge, a suspicious Achilles, a hamstring that feels tight for no reason. Almost all of these are your nervous system paying attention to signals that heavy training was drowning out. If it is not restricting your gait, ignore it.

Week -1: arrive

• Volume: about 25 km, gain minimal.
• Monday: 40 min easy.
• Tuesday: 40 min easy with 4 x 90 seconds at race effort. Last quality of the block.
• Wednesday: 30 min easy or off.
• Thursday: 25-30 min very easy with 4 x 20-second strides. Nothing that leaves a mark.
• Friday: rest, or 20 minutes of shakeout jogging if you are travelling and stiff.
• Saturday (race Sunday): 15-20 min very easy jog, or complete rest. Legs up.

Some runners prefer complete rest for two days before. Others need a short jog the day before to feel normal. Learn which you are during your training races, not during your goal race.

Fueling the taper

Do not diet during the taper. You are training less; the instinct to eat less follows, and it is wrong. You are trying to arrive with full glycogen stores and a body that has finished repairing.

Carb loading for an ultra is gentler than for a marathon. Marathon carb loading targets maximal glycogen because the marathon is roughly a glycogen-limited event. An ultra is not - you will be eating throughout, and the pace is lower and more fat-oxidative. Overdoing a load leaves you heavy, bloated, and carrying water weight you did not want to take up a mountain.

What works for most:

• Three days out: normal eating, slightly higher carbohydrate.
• Two days out and the day before: raise carbohydrate to roughly 7-8 g per kg of body weight per day, mostly from low-fibre, familiar sources. Reduce fibre and fat to keep your gut settled.
• Race morning: 1-2 g per kg, three hours before the start, of something you have tested. Then top up with something small 30-45 minutes before.

Hydrate normally, with electrolytes in the final 24 hours. Do not force litres of plain water - that flushes sodium and achieves nothing useful.

Sleep and the taper

Sleep in the last week is often terrible, especially the night before. This is normal and it barely matters - the research on one night of poor sleep before an endurance event shows minimal performance effect.

What does matter is the two weeks preceding it. Bank sleep during weeks -3 and -2, when you have more free time because you are training less. The night before, if you cannot sleep, lie down and rest anyway. Do not add anxiety about sleep to the pile.

The psychology, briefly

The taper is uncomfortable in a way that has nothing to do with your legs.

• You will feel like you are losing fitness. You are not. Detraining takes weeks, not days.
• You will feel heavy and slow in the first taper week. That is accumulated fatigue surfacing as the training stimulus is removed. It resolves.
• You will want to add "just one more" long run. This is the single most common way to ruin a taper. There is no session in the final two weeks that can help you and several that can hurt you.
• You will get restless and irritable. Give yourself something else to do with the hours.

The most useful reframe I give athletes: the taper is not the absence of training. It is the part of the plan where the training you have already done becomes available to you.

Race week logistics

Do these in week -1 so none of them cost you energy in the final 48 hours:

• Lay out and check every piece of mandatory kit against the current race list.
• Pack drop bags with labelled, pre-portioned fuel.
• Write your aid station plan on paper: what you eat, what you refill, what you swap, at which station.
• Confirm travel, accommodation, parking, and start times. Check the weather forecast and adjust your kit and pacing accordingly.
• Test your race breakfast at the actual time you will eat it.

The mistakes

1. Tapering too little. The most common one. A 20% cut in the final week is not a taper.
2. Removing all intensity. Produces flat legs and a heavy first hour.
3. Adding a "confidence" long run in the final ten days. It builds no confidence and costs real freshness.
4. Changing anything. New shoes, new gel brand, new pack, new pacing strategy, new breakfast. Race day is not the venue for experiments.
5. Under-eating because you are training less.
6. Reading the taper's phantom niggles as real injuries and panicking.
7. Travelling badly. A long-haul flight two days before, or a five-hour drive the morning of, is training load you did not plan for.

If you want to know whether your block earned the taper in the first place, the race readiness score grades the last twelve weeks and tells you where the gap is while there is still time to close it.