With less than one month to go until the London Marathon, this weekend will be my last long run before I begin to taper.

This is where you decrease the intensity of your training to allow sufficient recovery time so that your body is in peak condition on race day.

Every runner is different so there is no standard formula for tapering. I reduce my weekly mileage three weeks before the London Marathon. After three months of running between 25 and 50 miles per week, I am going to spend the remaining weeks doing no more than 20.

The trouble is that tapering is not much fun. Instead of putting my feet up safe in the knowledge that the worst of the training is behind me, I get heavy legs from not running as much and feel slightly on edge.

One thing that helps is doing other types of exercise, but I avoid anything that’s too exhausting because it defeats the whole purpose of tapering. Cycling is good, provided you don’t go too hard and don’t have a crash, swimming is even better because it gets your heart racing but is kind to the joints.

Right, I’m off down the pool to stroke away a bit of my running frustration.

See you next week.