The long road to Comrades Marathon 2016 ends this Sunday. This is your final bit of insight from the Comrades Coach, who has some valuable race day information. On this episode of the Ask Coach Parry podcast, he also tells you what’s the most important thing to remember on race day.

Transcript

Brad Brown: Well, that’s it, our last podcast here on the Ask Coach Parry platform before Comrades 2016. It is the Friday before race that we’re releasing this and Lindsey Parry joins us once again. Lindsey, welcome back, nice to touch base.

A couple of days to go, I don’t want to say ‘two sleeps’ because we know no one sleeps on Comrades, the night before Comrades. But let’s talk about some final race day instructions from the coach. What do you want people to know about going into Comrades on Sunday?

Lindsey Parry: Look, I think there’s three things that are really critical. Number one, get to the start early. You don’t want to start your day in a panic. You’re going to be scared enough and in enough of a panic, so leave really early. Get to the start, or get dropped off an hour before the race.

You want to be in Maritzburg, out of your car at 4:30 in the morning. Number two, hold back at the beginning. No matter what the circumstances are, the first 27km are the hardest part of the route, so you’ve really got to hold yourself back there. Number three, is to enjoy yourself.

Don’t forget to enjoy yourself

We spend a lot of time talking about the race, it is an enormous task, it’s 89km, there’s massive climbs. But you’ve heard all those things over and over and over again, you are scared enough. Don’t forget to enjoy yourself.

The first 40km, in particular, offer you an enormous opportunity to interact with the crowd, interact with fellow runners and really just a whole lot more out of Comrades than just running a race. When the going gets tough a little bit later on, if you’ve had enough fun throughout the day, that will really help you when you get to that crunch time.

Because you won’t have expended enormous amounts of energy stressing for however many hours and interacting with people and getting to know people and enjoying yourself on the road. Will also just help the time go by without you focussing, literally, on what you’re doing every kilometre of the day.

BB: Awesome stuff. Lindsey, I’m disappointed you didn’t tell everyone what you normally tell me before a big race?

LP: Now I’m a little worried because it’s probably something along the lines of… ‘Don’t F- it up!’

BB: I was going to stay ‘Don’t stuff it up’ but yes, that’s pretty much it. Lindsey Parry, it’s been amazing building up to Comrades 2016 once again, thank you so much for your time, once again. I know you’re going to be out on race route as well with your athletes.

So best of luck to everyone you’ve coached and particularly up-front, we’re hoping for another South African victory. I’m not going to jinx it, but we’ll just leave it at that. Lindsey thanks a lot again and we look forward to catching up post-Comrades 2016 when we start it again, for Comrades 2017. Until then, we’ll chat soon, take care.

LP: Good luck everybody.