How to do a sensible slow build-up to the Comrades Marathon

How to do a sensible slow build-up to the Comrades Marathon

In this edition of the Ask Coach Parry podcast, I’m Brad Brown, Lindsey Parry with us. Lindsey, there were so many people inspired by Comrades 2015. If I just look at the numbers of our websites and the number of beginners training programs that were downloaded, literally in the first few days after the Comrades Marathon.

It’s incredible how the race has just captured people’s minds once again and I think Caroline Wostmann had a lot to do with that. Got a question in from Michelle.

Michelle says she’s never run Comrades before, but she is in for 2016, she belongs to Hillcrest Village’s athletics club and was wondering if you could give us some advice on when she should start her training. She’s run four half marathons already and her average time is around 2:10.

Any advice would be much appreciated. So this is someone who has got a slight base, she’s running halves, which is pretty good and she wants to have a bit of an onslaught onto Comrades 2016, how should she go about that?

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Lindsey Parry: Look, she’s in a very fortunate position actually, a lot of people decide they want to run Comrades after doing no running.

She also can run along the Comrades route on many of her training runs. So she’s going to know exactly what to expect on race day. From now, for the rest of the year, she should aim for a marathon at the end of the year.

So building up from having run four half marathons already, building up to a marathon is actually not that difficult. But you do still want to take a sensible slow build-up and I will direct her to the Comrades programs that will go up on the 1st of July because most of those will include running a marathon towards the end of this year.

That’ll get her qualified and it will get her a lot more confident and it means that next year she can really just focus on the business of preparing her body for an 89km Down run and if they haven’t finished the road works, we may sneak into the 90s next year. She can focus on preparation rather than needing to race a marathon for a qualifier next year.

BB: Awesome stuff. Michelle, I hope that helps, please stay in touch if there’s anything that we can do to help, all you need to do is pop us a mail. If you have a question you’d like us to answer, all you have to do is get over to coachparry.com

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