How to tackle the Comrades Marathon after an other big race

How to tackle the Comrades Marathon after an other big race

This is the Ask Coach Parry podcast, I’m Brad Brown, Lindsey Parry with us once again. Lindsey, a question in from Francisco, it’s been a while Francisco, thanks for being in touch. He’s looking at doing a couple of big races next year. He wants to know, is it okay to do a 100km three day multi-stage mountain race. He’s talking about doing a race in South America in February, and then going on and running Comrades in the same year. He wants to know, is it advisable or not?

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Lindsey Parry: Look, there’s quite a lot of time between February and the Comrades Marathon race day, so I would say that that is going to be okay. It’s not a hundred miler or a 100km tough race which happens in one day. I’m not saying the race itself isn’t tough, it may well be very tough, but it gives you enough time to really spend two to three weeks recovering well from that race. Then still getting in your March and April peak training months into Comrades.

Keep your recovery in mind with multiple races

Of course, if you treat the three day race as a training event rather than actually racing it, that would be even better. Because then you wouldn’t necessarily need nearly as much recovery afterwards and you must accept that if you are going to flog your body really hard in that race that there will be some payback.

So you may not be able to train quite as well as you would have liked to have in March and April, so those are really the things that I’d consider. How important is that race to you, how hard do you want to race it? Then just accept that if you do want to race it hard, that there is going to be a little bit of trade off in Comrades. But it’s very definitely doable to do both of those events in the same year.

BB: Excellent stuff, Francisco, thanks so much for your question. Alternatively you can send me to do that race in South America, it sounds amazing and we’ll welcome you at Comrades with open arms! Thank you so much for being in touch, we look forward to seeing you back in South Africa in 2016, until next time, from the two of us, it’s cheers.

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