How to become a Comrades Marathon Bill Rowan candidate

How to become a Comrades Marathon Bill Rowan candidate

Is the Bill Rowan medal achievable for your “average” runner? How do you start adapting your Comrades Marathon training to get there? What does it really take? Hear from Lindsey on this episode of the Ask Coach Parry podcast, if you have those Bill Rowan ambitions. (Photo Credit: A massive thanks to Simone Verster for letting us use a pic of her well earned Bill Rowan in 2015)

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Transcript

Another question in today about Comrades on the Ask Coach Parry podcast that was submitted by Neil du Plessis. I’m Brad Brown, Lindsey Parry with us. Lindsey, Neil’s question, he gives us a bit of background. He says: I’ve run three Comrades Marathons before and all three between 10:42 and 10:48, pretty consistent there. He says, how does a runner like me become a Bill Rowan candidate?

From your previous advice he gathers that he simply can’t get onto the Bill Rowan training programme because his times are too slow. What would be a reasonable time frame or tactic to achieve this? What he’s thinking is, after Comrades 2016, to maintain his training effort, but focus on 10km and speed and then pick up Comrades training in January 2017. He’s also love to know how you took an ordinary runner like Caroline Wostmann and turned her into a superstar. Caroline, she was an average, ordinary person, but she wasn’t an average, ordinary runner. She’s got ability Lindsey?

The key to running faster at Comrades

Lindsey Parry: Ja, so look, to answer the first question. He’s answered that very well himself already. That’s exactly what needs to be done. He needs to spend a couple of months, so he’ll recover fully. This is also a mistake people often make is that they don’t recover fully from Comrades. They start training again and then it’s quite difficult because you don’t have the freshness required in your legs.

It’s quite difficult to then build the speed necessary. So, recover fully from Comrades. Rest from running for three weeks, perhaps you can add in a little bit of cross training two weeks out, but I wouldn’t. I’d take a full rest of three weeks from all forms of exercise.

Then build yourself up nice and slowly, just getting back into a habit and then you spend the last three months of the year really working hard at targeting 5km, 10km, 15km and perhaps 21km times. You really improve those and then look at getting a solid marathon in early in January or in January, not early in January. Then a little bit of recovery and then focus on Comrades. He kind of answers that quite well himself, that’s the way to go about it.

What makes Caroline Wostmann so special

Look, I’ve got to say that there’s really nothing ordinary about Caroline. She was a highly driven person in business, so she was doing very well as a CA in business. She had an incredible aptitude and ability in running and when she came to me, she was already a Comrades Gold Medallist.

So I know that she wasn’t a household name, she hadn’t won any major races, but she was already a Comrades Gold Medallist. I like to think that I helped her get to her potential quicker than she would have otherwise, but she’s a determined smart individual that I think would have gotten to winning the Comrades at some point over the next four or five years because the other thing she is, is ambitious.

She didn’t come to me because she wanted to get another Gold Medal, she came to me because she wanted to win Comrades. She had ambition, she had discipline, she had ability and together we managed to get her to win the Comrades a bit quicker than she may have otherwise done.

BB: Sadly for a lot of us average runners, as much as we have the discipline and the ambition and the drive to succeed, ability does play a big part in it Lindsey.

LP: Absolutely, look, Bruce Fordyce always says that if you want to be a professional sportsman, you must choose your parents wisely.

How coachparry.com can help you achieve your Comrades goal

BB: Exactly and unfortunately I didn’t. Lindsey, thank you very much for that, much appreciated. Neil, I hope that helps and best of luck, let us know how your progression goes, we’d love to see how you go. If you need more help, if you’d like a training programme from Lindsey, just get to coachparry.com.

Get on there, let Lindsey help you get that Bill Rowan. Lindsey, just to wrap up there, you love the Bill Rowan medal cause you reckon it’s one of the medals that average, ordinary athletes can aspire to, even if you don’t have tons of ability.

LP: Yes, look, it does require absolute commitment and dedication and effectively training very much like, very similar to a Silver Medal athlete. Obviously compromising a little bit on the volume and intensity, just so we can ensure that we don’t get injured.

But you need to put in a lot of commitment, a lot of time commitment. But it is possible for what I call ‘fairly average Joes’ to get what is a fantastic medal, only 25% of the field go on to get a Bill Rowan.

BB: There you go Neil, coachparry.com is where you can get all that info and if you’re listening to this and you’d love to chase a Bill Rowan, go check it out. until next time, from the two of us, it’s cheers.

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