As of tomorrow, it will be thirty days and exactly one month to the London Marathon. So far, all is going well. I have had a few niggling little injury setbacks but have recovered from them, and am hoping that I remain injury-free for the rest of my training. At the weekend, I will do another long run of twenty miles, give or take, and from there, begin tapering - that is, running less and resting more. This is where I will be gradually winding down the training and doing fewer miles with each week, decreasing the total mileage by roughly 20% from the previous week. I will cut out any part of my training in which hills or major inclines are present, so as to avoid damaging my muscles.
I know it sounds ludicrous - why spend the last few weeks of marathon training by taking it easy? The idea is to let the body recover for the big race so that you (by which I mean I) will be in peak physical condition for the marathon and have plenty of energy and the muscles are able to repair themselves.
A lot of runners make the fatal (well, not literally fatal) mistake of not tapering. You need those last few weeks to give the body time to heal itself and store energy, and to recover physically and mentally from all the months of training. There's not much more you can do in the last few weeks if you have already spent the previous months training intensively. Why over-exert yourself, get injured and ruin everything?
So, once the weekend and the long run are over, I will be progressively slowing things down - not putting a stop to them altogether - just gradually easing up.
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