How to taper for a marathon
Cut your training volume by roughly 40–60% over the last two to three weeks, but keep your usual number of runs and some running at race pace or faster. Meta-analyses support this pattern, and in more than 158,000 marathoners a strict, steadily decreasing 3-week taper was linked to finishing about 2.6% faster.
What to do
- Cut total weekly volume by about 41–60% compared with your peak weeks.
- Keep running as often as usual, and keep some faster work. Make the faster sessions shorter, not slower.
- Make every taper week smaller than the one before. Never let a taper week go back up.
- Use 3 weeks if you run 40 km a week or more; 2 weeks is reasonable below that. The per-week split is coaching convention.
- Don't try to make up missed training during the taper.
What a taper is
A taper is the planned reduction in training before a race. The aim is to shed fatigue while keeping the fitness you have built. The research question is how much to cut, what to cut, and for how long.
The meta-analyses
Two meta-analyses (studies that pool many trials) point the same way.
- Wang and colleagues, 2023 pooled 14 studies. Cutting total volume by 41–60% gave the largest benefit, and a taper of 8–14 days was best. Intensity and how often athletes trained were kept the same. Tapering did not change running economy or VO2max. One reading is that the taper works by removing fatigue rather than by adding fitness.
- Bosquet and colleagues, 2007 found the same pattern in older studies: a 2-week taper and a 41–60% volume cut gave the clearest effects.
The big marathon dataset
Smyth and Lawlor, 2021 analysed more than 158,000 recreational marathoners and grouped them by how they tapered.
- Runners with a strict 3-week taper, where volume dropped every week, finished about 2.6% faster than runners with a minimal taper. That works out at about 5 minutes 32 seconds.
- Roughly two-thirds of runners tapered less strictly than that.
- Women gained more from a strict taper than men. The authors put this down to women pacing more evenly on race day.
This is observational. Runners who taper carefully may also do other things well, so not all of the 2.6% is necessarily the taper itself.
Elite marathoners tend to start their taper later, about 7–10 days out (Haugen and colleagues, 2022). The meta-analyses favour 8–14 days, and the recreational data favour 3 weeks. These fit together better than they seem: a 2–3-week taper that steps down steadily, with the deepest cut in the final week, satisfies both. A longer Pfitzinger-style 3-week taper and a shorter Hansons-style taper of about 10 days are both defensible.
Myth: “cut the intensity in the taper”
A common piece of advice is to do only easy running in the last weeks. The evidence says the opposite. In the meta-analyses, the taper worked when volume was cut but intensity and frequency were kept (Wang and colleagues, 2023). Nothing in this research suggests that dropping the faster running helps.
In practice that means keeping your usual number of runs, making each one shorter, and keeping short bits at race pace or faster. As an illustration (ours, not from a study), a threshold session of 4 × 8 minutes might become 2 × 8 minutes at the same pace.
A sample 3-week taper
The shape below follows the research. The exact percentages for each week are coaching convention, not tested numbers:
| Week | Volume compared with your peak week |
|---|---|
| 3 weeks out | 75–85% |
| 2 weeks out | 60–70% |
| Race week (not counting the race) | 40–50% |
For runners below about 40 km a week, a 2-week version is a reasonable alternative.
Common timing conventions, also untested, are:
- Last full long run about 3 weeks before the race.
- Last proper quality session 3–5 days before the race.
- One or two short touches of marathon pace or threshold running in each taper week.
Don’t use the taper to catch up
If illness or injury cost you training earlier in the build, the taper is not the place to make it up. Plan forward from where you are and never stack missed volume; that is our suggestion, based on coaching convention. Squeezing extra long runs into the last weeks also risks breaking the long-run spike rule.
A short break earlier does have a cost. In a study of 292,323 runners, a 7–13-day break in training between 3 and 12 weeks before the race was linked to a finish about 4.25% slower (Feely and colleagues, 2023). Our suggestion: adjust your goal time rather than cram.
What we don’t know
- The marathon-specific evidence is observational. No randomized trial has compared taper lengths in recreational marathoners.
- Much of the training research is male-skewed, so the size of the benefit for women is less certain, even though women gained more in the marathon data.
- The per-week percentages are convention. The research supports the overall cut and the steady downward shape, not a specific number for each week.
- Why women gained more is an interpretation by the authors, not something the data proved.
Sources
- Wang et al. (2023). Meta-analysis of 14 taper studies in endurance athletes.
- Bosquet et al. (2007). Earlier meta-analysis of tapering and performance.
- Smyth and Lawlor (2021). Taper discipline and finish times in more than 158,000 recreational marathoners.
- Haugen et al. (2022). Review of how world-class distance runners train.
- Feely et al. (2023). Training breaks before a marathon and finish times in 292,323 runners.
Last reviewed 13 November 2026.