Comrades Marathon – how to pace the race

Comrades Marathon – how to pace the race

Are you worried about your Comrades Marathon pacing plan? Are you a person who likes to plot your race kilometre by kilometre? On this episode of the Ask Coach Parry podcast, Lindsey gives you tips on what is the best way to go at a race as long as the Comrades Marathon.

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Transcript

You’re listening to the Ask Coach Parry podcast, I’m Brad Brown and we’ve got Lindsey Parry with us once. Before we get into today’s question; it’s a few days late, things have been absolutely chaotic, I’ve obviously just got back from Port Elizabeth from Ironman South Africa and my brain is still fried.

But it’s time to give away that lifetime membership for March, to the Coach Parry online platform. All you need to do is head over to coachparry.com/win. If you’d like to win yourself one of those and one of the things you need to do is leave us a review and a rating on iTunes. That’s exactly what Graham Mitchell did. Graham, thanks for yours, gave us five stars.

He said: This is so amazing, what a resource, I’m an Old Mutual Two Ocean’s Marathon and Comrades novice, too much information really throws me. This is to the point and simple, easy to follow. Because it’s so simple, it even helps setting the mind and making me believe that I can do it - top Class.

Graham Mitchell, you are top class mate, thank you very much. I’ll be in touch via email to sort you out with your login details. You’ve won yourself a lifetime membership to the Coach Parry online community. Lindsey, let’s get into today’s question and it’s one from Hugo, from within that community.

I think it’s quite an interesting one on pacing. We spoke about it last week. He says: How does one pace a race in practical terms, especially one like Comrades where some sections are done at different paces to others. He says, when using a Garmin, for example, is it best to make a workout consisting of separate laps for each length or segment of the race, on the pacing plan or is there a better way?

Next, if something begins to happen and the pace was wrong, adjusting that pace in the next segment may fix it, but may ruin the lap pace for that segment. With the segments all being different in length, it makes it quite confusing. You know what it’s like at Comrades Lindsey, to do simple maths makes it hard, what’s the easiest way to pace this thing?

The easiest way to pace Comrades

Lindsey Parry: Look, that does make it quite complicated and it’s nice to have an idea of roughly what you’re targeting over certain sections. But you also don’t want it to get too complicated. I have pacing charts that will be sold at the expo.

What I would do in this instance, cause I’ve had quite a few dealings now with Hugo, and I understand a little bit of how his thinking is. He does need things to be in their little boxes and quite precise. For that sort of personality and needing that kind of thing.

What I would look at doing is either making your own pacing chart or taking one of those from the expo and then with a permanent marker, just making a notation of roughly the minutes per K you’re targeting over each segment.

Trying to make it too complicated and setting it upon a watch, you still within each segment are going to get fairly big fluctuations. Because if we look at the Comrades route, there’s in a 13km segment, for example, there may be quite a hard climb and quite a long downhill. It’s net effect is that it’s a slight downhill section.

Then it’s net effect means that your average minutes per kilometre are going to be lower than the average that you’re targeting over the whole race. But there’s going to be a section that’s going to be a lot slower and there’s going to be a section that’s going to be a lot faster. That’s a difficult thing to like constantly monitor. It’s actually quite exhausting doing so.

Why pacing charts work well for Comrades

That’s why I like, a pacing chart is a guideline. It’s not an exact science. So we have different points on the route that we want to get to by a certain time. If, for example, we’ve said that we’re going to get to Cato Ridge, which is at 30km and we’re planning on getting there in 2.5 hours. If you get there in 2 hours and 27 minutes, it’s a little bit quick, but if it felt, super, super comfortable, then we don’t panic.

If you look at it and it feels, okay, it is a bit quick. You’re honest with yourself that you maybe were pushing just a little bit hard through that section. Then you’ll adjust slightly and run a bit slower through the next section and that’ll take you to halfway. I’m just using examples, I don’t have the exact point in front of me and you kind of recalibrate like that, as we’re going along.

You’re looking at broad guidelines of roughly the average pace that you want to be on a segment. So that’s perhaps not a bad way of doing it. If you want to be a little bit more precise, is rather than building segments into the watch, turn off your auto lap. Then have your pace showing the average pace for that particular segment. Then as you slow down, or as you speed up, the average won’t change much.

As long as your average is staying roughly within a couple of seconds, either side is okay, then you’re doing okay. Have little landmarks that you’re targeting to get to in certain times. Then as I say, each lapped segment will give you a rough idea of how close you were to that average time. It isn’t exact, it’s difficult to keep track of it K to K and if you do try, unfortunately, it will be a mentally exhausting exercise.

BB: Brilliant, Hugo, best of luck and we look forward to chatting again in that private Facebook group. Don’t forget, if you’d like to join the Coach Parry online community, the website to get to is coachparry.com/join. Until next time, from the two of us, it’s cheers.

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