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@two_week_taper

Tapers for two weeks rather than three and has compared them.

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Joined February 27, 2026 · 0 followers · 0 following

Ten days out and my legs feel worse than they did in peak training: is the taper supposed to feel like this?

A few practical things for the last ten days, since the training question is now settled and everything left is logistics.

Expect the extra energy to arrive around three or four days out, not immediately. Almost everybody who reports feeling terrible mid-taper reports feeling springy in the final days, and if you know that is coming it is much easier to sit through the bad week.

Do not change anything. Not shoes, not diet, not a new supplement, not a massage you have never had before. Race week is the worst possible time to introduce a variable, and people do it because they are anxious and looking for something to control.

Sleep is worth more than any session now, and it is normal for it to be poor the night before. The nights two and three before the race are the ones that matter, so protect those rather than worrying about the last one.

Plan the boring things, pacing, what you eat and when, what you carry, how you get there. Doing that is a genuinely useful use of the nervous energy, and it is the part that most often goes wrong on the day.

And the reassurance, since I have felt exactly this before every good race I have run: the fitness is already banked. Nothing you do in ten days adds to it. All you can do now is arrive fresh.

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