Learning To Do Less: The Weird Head Games Before Race Day
Another BMO Vancouver marathon in the books, trained on three runs a week and a lot of trust
Before you lace up: training for a marathon is a serious commitment. Make sure to check in with your doctor or healthcare provider before starting any program. Respect the distance, respect your body—it’s the only one you’ve got.
Three years ago, at the start of my running career, I ran BMO Vancouver1 for the first time, and I promised myself “never again”. This year, I remembered why, but did it anyway. It’s true, the scenery on course is very pretty - but the hills are relentless.
The hard part wasn’t the marathon, the hills, the heat, but the taper: The strange mental mess that happens when the hard work is already done.
My training followed a rhythm I followed before2: only three runs a week, supplemented with cross-training like yoga, strength, interval/speed workouts, and weekly long runs that all combined made the difference on race day. I no longer need to run six days a week to prove anything, especially when I’m also trying to have a life outside the training plan.
The real marathon: 18 weeks of training
The real marathon is not the 42.2 kilometres you run on race day. It’s the weeks of planning around work, sleep, weather, meals, laundry, appointments, social capacity, emotional energy, and all the other invisible things you do in the weeks leading up to race day that either support your training or slowly ruin it.
This time, the actual race was hard. Vancouver is not a flat course, and the weather turned unusually warm, climbing toward 24 degrees Celsius. I like heat more than most runners do, and I was probably one of the few people deliberately running in the sun while others chased every patch of shade.
But the part I want to write about here is not race day. It’s the taper. Because somehow, after all those long runs, all those early mornings, all those structured weeks, the taper still managed to be the strangest and most difficult part of the entire training cycle. Doing less sounds easy, until you have to live through it.
When less running creates more noise
Doing less is easy, right? You reduce mileage, and let the body absorb the work. You stop chasing fitness and start preserving energy. You trust that the training is already in the bank. Somehow, this is where it’s all supposed to magically come together.
For me, taper weeks feel like someone took away the one thing that was keeping the whole system organized. During peak training, I know what I’m doing. There is a long run. There is a midweek run. There is a treadmill class or speed session. There is yoga, maybe strength, maybe some recovery work. The week has a shape to it.
Then taper arrives, and suddenly the structure is gone. That should feel restful, but it can also feel unsettling. I start noticing every small ache. My mind starts questioning every decision: Do I run? Do I rest? Did I do enough? Did I do too much? Is that tightness something real, or just taper madness with better branding?
By the final week before BMO, I wasn’t exactly floating into the race in a state of blissful calm. I had trained well, but emotionally it had been a tense week. Work, life, conversations, fatigue, and the general static of being human all seemed louder than usual. The running volume goes down, but life does not always get the memo.3
Three runs a week still works for me
For VIP members, I’ll make a downloadable copy of my 18-week BMO marathon training plan available, including the three-run-a-week structure and the cross-training approach I used to prepare for both Victoria and Vancouver, and squeeze in a Mexico vacation in the middle.
