You are with Ask Coach Parry. On this episode we check in on where the guys looking for a sub 7 ½ hour Comrades Marathon finish should be in their training.

This is the time where the rubber meets the road in terms of training, so what should the guys and girls aiming for a silver Comrades Marathon medal be doing?

Brad Brown: You are with Ask Coach Parry. On this episode we check in on where the guys looking for a sub 7 ½ hour Comrades Marathon finish should be in their training.

This is the time where the rubber meets the road in terms of training, so what should the guys and girls aiming for a silver Comrades Marathon medal be doing?

Lindsey Parry: These are really really good runners. It takes an enormous amount of training on top of being an exceptional runner to get a silver medal. You should have run a sub 3 hour marathon by now.

What is important?

My feeling on the rest of this year – if you are very serious about running a silver medal – is it’s actually less important to run the sub 3 now and more important to get you in the kind of condition that will give you the confidence that you feel like you could have run a sub 3 if you had raced it.

But I wouldn’t chase an ‘A’ ceding if you haven’t got an ‘A’ ceding already. Right now, because we are going to do so much hard training for this medal, in March and April we do a hell of a lot of running.

You do not want to go into March and April tired. For me the goal for right now would be to set the goal for a slightly shorter race, perhaps a 21 or a 32km.

To be starting to work right now on your speed, and we work on speed roughly till the end of February where hopefully you get to race a 21 or 32km.

Which, essentially, gives you the confidence to know ‘I could have gone on to run a sub 3 hour marathon’. And prepare your body to do a hell of a good March and April.

I am looking at going for silver again this year, so at the moment I am looking at doing between 80 and 100km’s. With doing some good quality work.

I am building that up to about 100 and 110/115km’s per week towards the end of March. Then from March and April we are going to bang the mileage up and start working on strength so that we can prepare for the up Comrades Marathon.