Peaking for cross country championships means doing less for the last two weeks. Cut your weekly mileage by roughly 40 to 60 percent, keep your hard days but make them shorter, and keep running on the same days you always do. Your fitness was built in July, August and September. The job now is to show up to the line fresh enough to use it.
That sounds easy. It isn't, because every instinct you have after a bad invitational says to train harder.
What the research actually says
The best summary is a 2007 meta-analysis by Bosquet and colleagues that pooled 27 studies on tapering. The pattern that worked best for performance:
- About two weeks long
- Training volume cut by 41 to 60 percent, tapering down gradually rather than all at once
- Intensity kept the same
- How often you train kept the same
Those last two are where high school runners go wrong. Cutting volume is the taper. Cutting the fast running and taking random days off is how you end up feeling flat.
Why your legs feel terrible during a taper
Almost everyone feels weird in taper week. Heavy legs on an easy run, a workout that feels harder than it should, a sudden fear that you've lost all your fitness in four days. You haven't. Fitness takes weeks to fade, not days.
Some of the heavy feeling is just your body doing repairs it didn't have time for while you were running 40 miles a week. Some of it is nerves. Strides help more than anything. Four to six relaxed 100 meter pickups after an easy run remind your legs what fast feels like without costing you anything.
A sample two weeks
This is an example for a high school runner who's been averaging around 35 miles a week. It is not a replacement for your coach's plan. If your coach has a taper, run your coach's taper.
Notice what stays: the same days, the same kind of workout, the same race pace. The reps and the miles are what drop. A normal week of 8 x 1000 becomes 5, then 3.
Conference, sectionals, state: peaking more than once
This is the hard part of high school cross country: championship season can be three or four meets in a row, one a week, and you can't do a full two week taper for each.
What works for most teams:
- Treat conference and sectionals as a mini taper. Drop a bit of volume the week of, keep the workout, and race.
- Save the full taper for the meet that matters most. For most varsity runners that's the meet that qualifies you for state, or state itself if you're already a lock.
- Between meets, don't try to squeeze in a big workout to "stay sharp". The races are your workouts now.
If you're not sure which meet to peak for, that's a conversation to have with your coach this week, not the Tuesday before sectionals.
Sleep and food
Sleep is the cheapest performance booster you've got. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommends 8 to 10 hours a night for teenagers, and most high school runners in the middle of fall are nowhere close. Taper weeks are the time to fix it. The two nights before the race count more than the night before, because nerves wreck the last one for almost everyone.
Food: eat normally. Race week is not the time for a new diet, a new pre-race breakfast or a giant pasta dinner you don't usually eat. Eat what you ate before your best race this season, at the same time before the start.
Race week details that cost people places
- Check your spikes and pins. Late season courses get muddy, and a stripped pin at the line is a bad way to start. Our cross country explained guide covers spike length rules by level.
- Walk or jog the course the day before if you can. Know where the last 800 meters starts.
- Know the start. Championship fields are bigger and they go out fast. Get position in the first 400 to 800 meters without running your first mile 20 seconds faster than you can hold.
- Plan your warm-up to finish about 10 minutes before the gun, not 40.
After the last race
Take a real break. A week of little or no running after your final championship, then easy running before indoor or winter base training starts. The runners who skip the break are usually the ones who get hurt in December.
If you're a parent and this is your senior's last championship, it's a big day. Our gifts for cross country runners guide has ideas that go beyond another team shirt. And if you need something for the easy miles between meets, that's what our split shorts are for.
