Does the Comrades Marathon scenario of running negative splits appeal to you in your attempt to run a faster marathon? On this episode of the Ask Coach Parry podcast, Lindsey gets asked how you should run the first half of a marathon if you are aiming for negative splits. The truth of the matter is, it’s the race profile which will decide where and where not to make up time.

Transcript

Brad Brown: Welcome onto yet another edition of the Ask Coach Parry podcast and it was just over a week ago Lindsey, you popped up a fast Friday on the website, coachparry.com. It had to do with one of your athletes who has done fantastically well and ran a brilliant negative split at Comrades. Today’s question is along the same sort of lines and it’s from Wandisile.

Wandi was asking, he said, how slow should you run the first half of a marathon if you aim to do negative splits? He says he tends to start slow and he just gets slower. It’s a difficult question to answer because obviously you can’t give someone an exact pace, depending on the pace they run, but what’s the best way to approach a marathon. Surely it doesn’t just start at the marathon, it starts in your training, training yourself to run negative splits in training.

A great example of the perfect negative splits

Lindsey Parry: Correct and look, it does depend a lot on the route. If we look at someone like Christine Kalmer who ran a 2:33:40-something qualifier yesterday at the Valencia Marathon, when you look at her splits, she was 55 seconds quicker in the second half.

That’s about as close to perfect as you’re going to get in a marathon and Valencia is a fairly fast and flat marathon. If you are running a pretty flat marathon, then you should run a fairly even split. In other words, your time in the first half and the second half is similar.

But probably what will happen is in the last 7-12km, the effort to maintain the pace will just skyrocket at the end of the marathon, but because you’ve saved enough in your legs and even though it hurts like hell, you are still able to maintain that same pace.

In a flat marathon, that would tell me that you did a pretty close to perfect marathon. Comrades and the reason why I make so much noise about the negative splits in Comrades is because of the relative change in degree of difficulty between the first half and the second half.

Both the Up and the Down run have the hardest part of the race in the first 50km of the race, which therefore means that you should be able to run much quicker in the last 39km provided you are still able to run. For a marathon, even split, should be possible regardless of the amount of training you’ve done.

How to adjust your race goal according to your training

What you’ve got to do is you’ve got to adjust your goal for the amount of training that you’ve done. If you know that at your absolute best, fittest, when everything is going 100% according to plan, you are probably capable of a three-and-a-half-hour marathon; but now your training has been way better, or your training has been way worse, then you adjust for a new goal.

If you’ve done exceptional training and you’re going for a PB, the closer you get to your sort of end game or not going to improve much more, the smaller those time shifts will be. You may set out for a 3:25, or you know; training really hasn’t been good or I’ve been ill or I’m running a much harder route, or I’m running at altitude and I set my PB at sea level, then you adjust and you say, aim for 3:45.

Then you work out your split depending on, if it’s a really tough marathon, but the first half is as tough as the second half, then you’re still going to aim for equal splits. If it’s a Kaapsehoop scenario where you’re going to run downhill pretty much till 30km, and then you know you’ve got a really tough 6km of climbing as part of those last 7-8km, then you will allow for that.

Your goal and the race route will determine your splits

You will go a little quicker in the first half, but you don’t go crazy. You maybe have a five-minute positive split and that’s how you go about working what is the best and most effective way to running a race. You really just need to take into account a really good goal and what is the profile.

When am I going to need to give time back, where am I going to be able to make time up and in both of those scenarios you then limit the damage. You limit the amount that you’re going to lose and you limit the amount that you’re going to catch up by managing your race properly.

BB: Brilliant stuff, Lindsey, thank you very much for that and thanks for that question too, we look forward to answering another one on the next edition of the Coach Parry podcast, until then, from myself, Brad Brown, and Lindsey Parry, it’s cheers.