Welcome to Ask Coach Parry. Today we chat more about changing shoes before the Comrades Marathon.

The question today is from someone who has just run a qualifier for the Comrades Marathon in their current pair of shoes and they think they may need to get a new pair.

When would be the best time to do this? When is too close to the Comrades Marathon, when is too late? What is the best way to go about it?

Brad Brown: Welcome to Ask Coach Parry. Today we chat more about changing shoes before the Comrades Marathon.

The question today is from someone who has just run a qualifier for the Comrades Marathon in their current pair of shoes and they think they may need to get a new pair.

When would be the best time to do this? When is too close to the Comrades Marathon, when is too late? What is the best way to go about it?

Lindsey Parry: You want to start taking a close look at your shoes and see if they need replacing somewhere around the 800km mark. If you are much heavier you would look a little bit sooner, if you are much lighter you would look a bit later.

But from the 18th you want to start looking at shoes – are you getting niggles in your calves, pains in your feet. There are normally tell tale signs and we get the same ones when a shoe is getting to the end of its shelf life.
So that will tell us that maybe we need a new pair of shoes. If you are going to be changing brands, you don’t want to do that much later than early March. If the shoe that you are going to buy is the same make and the same model and you are happy with the performance that that shoe has given you, you could go as late as May.

But ideally you want to make the change in around late April. Because what you want to try and do is get between 200 and 400km’s on the pair of shoes that you are going to be using for the Comrades Marathon.

Modern shoes mean that if there is an emergency and you get closer to race day, it is ok to change later on. But try wherever possible that you do it with at least 2 to 3 weeks so that you do get a minimum of 100 – 150km’s on those pair of shoes.

That is so that your foot settles into the shoe, but mostly to make sure that there isn’t an actual physical problem with that pair of shoes that you bought. I normally look to purchase my Comrades Marathon shoes somewhere around the 18th – 23rd/24th of April.