This is Ask Coach Parry and today we look at where you should be this early in the season for a Comrades Marathon finish.

In this episode we find out what the Bill Rowan Comrades Marathon finishers should be doing.

Brad Brown: This is Ask Coach Parry and today we look at where you should be this early in the season for a Comrades Marathon finish.

In this episode we find out what the Bill Rowan Comrades Marathon finishers should be doing.

Lindsey Parry: Bill Rowan runners are actually quite good runners. That is a fairly tough medal to get and takes a lot of training. Again, I have to split them into two groups here.

Guys that qualified last year and got their 3 ½ hour marathon – they need to build themselves up and literally get into shape to be able to run another sub 3 ½ marathon somewhere in April, without actually running the sub 3 ½ - because remember we don’t want to do the damage of that.

Right now that group of people should be running a maximum of 60km’s per week. They probably should be starting off quite similar to the bronze runners, at about 50 – 55km’s a week with a long run of 20 – 23km’s on the weekend and maybe a longish mid week run of 12 – 15km’s with an 8 – 10 on the other two days.

Gaining confidence

They don’t want to overdo it now. They are actually in pole position. Then there is another group of runners that perhaps didn’t get their 3 ½ last year or perhaps didn’t really get close.

Or they are novices so the build up has been slow and they haven’t actually run a marathon yet. But they need to get themselves in shape at the latest in late February.

So that crowd probably want to be around or at 60 – 65km’s a week. They are just starting to scratch the 25km training runs. Now introducing a little bit of hill work to build some strength towards the end of January.
When we look at the statistics, I have seem a couple of facebook chats now on the Comrades Marathon facebook page. Over 90% of runners who run a Bill Rowan ran a 3 1/3 hour marathon.

But there are loads of people that ran a 3 ½ hour marathon that don’t get a Bill Rowan. So 3 ½ is quite important, but then the rest of the training that you do around it becomes critical.

You have to be sensible in your build up. If you are going to crack that 3 ½ around February, it is imperative that you do then just take 10 days to consolidate and recover before you crack on and do the really hard yards in March and April.