Tapering is so familiar today that most runners probably assume it has always been done, but it hasn’t. Although it now seems self-evident that resting up after a period of hard training enhances subsequent race performance, this particular pattern of cause and effect was largely invisible to athletes before the middle of the last century. “People thought [that] to keep condition you had to train pretty hard right up to the event,” said Forbes Carlile regarding the prevailing attitude among his fellow swim coaches prior to his introduction of tapering to the sport.
The same attitude prevailed in running until the great Czech runner Emil Zátopek stumbled upon the same insight that struck Carlile at almost the same time on another continent and in a different sport. While training for the 1950 European Games Zátopek fell seriously ill and was hospitalized for two weeks, during which time he was unable to run a single step. Released from the hospital just two days before the Games, Zátopek won the 10,000 meters by a full lap and then won the 5,000 meters by twenty-three seconds. Throughout the rest of his career Zátopek made sure to rest up (outside the hospital!) before racing.
Winner of three gold medals in the 1952 Olympics, Zátopek was recognized as the greatest runner of his day and so his methods—including tapering—became broadly emulated by other runners. New Zealand running coach Arthur Lydiard incorporated tapering into the four-phase training system he developed in the late 1950s, which became an almost universal paradigm for the training of middle- and long-distance runners. (I’ll say more about Lydiard’s system in Chapter 9.)
Exercise scientists began to study the effects of various tapering protocols on swimming performance in the 1960s. Soon they expanded their investigations to include cyclists and runners. The taper became a popular object of scientific inquiry because it is an inherently short-term phenomenon and therefore much easier to control and manipulate than other aspects of the training process. Exercise scientists continue to study tapering methods intensively today.
There are two basic scientific approaches to the subject of tapering. Some studies aim to identify and quantify the performance-enhancing physiological adaptations that occur in response to a short-term reduction in training volume. These adaptations are now known to include increases in muscle glycogen storage, blood volume, and neuromuscular power. Other studies have compared the effects of different tapering protocols on performance. The main variables are the duration of the taper, the degree of initial training reduction, the rate of training reduction throughout the taper, and the amount of high-intensity training that is performed during the taper. It’s impossible to draw uniform, universally applicable conclusions from the total body of such studies, but there have been some consistent findings that provide useful, general guidelines for tapering.