There is always so much to consider when entering the Comrades Marathon as a novice. Even more so if you don’t have much of a running base to work on. On this episode of the Ask Coach Parry podcast, Lindsey gets asked whether December is too late to start training. There are varying aspects to look at, including can you meet the criteria? Hear what the Comrades Coach has to say…

Brad Brown: Welcome to this edition of the Ask Coach Parry podcast, another question in today from Facebook and it is from Vusani Baloi. Vusani was asking three questions. The first one has got to do with a knee injury but I’m not going to get into that because it’s quite difficult to give you advice with such a broad question. If you want to send us more details on that knee injury and where it’s sore and what’s causing it, we’d be more than willing to answer it.

His second and third question I think is pretty good, particularly from a Comrades novice perspective Lindsey. Vusani wanted to know, as a beginner and a novice runner, what is required to run the Comrades Marathon? I think we can look at criteria and what you need to do in order to run it and he wants to know, will it be too late to start preparing in December to run Comrades in 2016?

Comrades from scratch – you need at least a year

Lindsey Parry: Look, if you’ve done absolutely no running before, then December is too late to start. If you want to do Comrades from scratch, you need to look at starting more or less a year out. We’re starting to get into last chance saloon now as we move into September.

But if you’ve been fairly active or even if you’re active in a different way, perhaps doing a sport like hockey or football where there is some running involved, perhaps then you could start in December and that will be okay. Or I guess, if you were previously a fairly good runner and you haven’t run for many years, provided you started off at a low enough pace and built up slowly enough, then perhaps you could maybe do December for 2016, but it’s not the way I would recommend you to do it.

The basic requirements to be able to run Comrades

If you are a runner and just want to move up in distance, that’s cool. If you’re a complete newbie, start now, or otherwise start next year and build up for 2017. There’s a couple of basics, Comrades has got a really good filter in place already. If you can’t run a marathon in under 5 hours, then you can’t run Comrades anyway, even if you wanted to. So that’s kind of your prerequisite.

The things you want to have in place so that you are running between 30-40km a week, again this will depend on the medal, but I’m talking now exclusively about just finishing Comrades. You want to be doing a minimum of between 30-40km a week, really consistently. You want to have completed a marathon in under 5 hours.

Ideally you would have also wanted to complete one run of about 50km, something like Om Die Dam, Loskop, perhaps Two Oceans, which is 56km. If you’ve managed to finish that marathon and you managed to finish the ultra within the cut-off time, then your chance of success at Comrades are really good. As long as you stick to the basics, nothing new on race day, don’t go too fast at the start and you’re quite clear in your goal and what you’ve got to do to execute it on race day.

BB: There you go Vusani, thank you very much for that, best of luck and we look forward to hearing how you go in the build up to your very first Comrades Marathon, so thank you for that question. Lindsey Parry, thank you for your time today, we’re back again in a couple of days times. Until then, from myself, Brad Brown and Lindsey Parry, it’s cheers.