If you are following the 1-2-3 Program, you might ask yourself: is it healthy to always keep increasing?

The program is designed to have a very conservative mileage curve, that keeps on getting gentler as your mileage increases. That’s because it prescribes increases of only 1 km, even when the weekly mileage becomes very high.

There are reasons, however, why cutback weeks and tapering exist. Your body needs to recover, so that it can spring back and perform the task you set it to, be it another training cycle or a race.

A cutback week is easy and simple to understand and apply. You could decide, for whatever reason, to do less work one week. Say you are at W6 of C1 (2-3-6 km workouts), and you feel tired and spent. Simply drop 1 km from each workout, and run only 1 km Speedy, 3 km Steady and 5 km Long. Run them slower than the previous week, too. You could also change the Speedy to a Recovery.

You feel really tired? Just do week 1 of your cycle again. Slowly. With Recovery. Generally, after a cutback week, you can continue where you had left. So you would go on to do W7 and finish the cycle. This is really up to you and how you feel.

Tapering is another approach. After W6, you could do again W4, then W2, then W4 again, than W6 again, and finally W7. Tapering is used mostly to prepare for (and recover from) races.

In the example above, you could do a race during that W2 week, as you would be very fresh and at your maximum potential. Than you’d do W4, before going back to W6 and continuing on to W7.

For longer runs, you might add a couple of weeks of taper before the race, and maybe one week more afterwards. A gentle and symmetrical taper helps you race fresh and strong, and helps you train again at your usual load without risk of injury.

Use this two tools wisely, because they are both an essential part of your training.