What pace should your Comrades Marathon training be done at?

What pace should your Comrades Marathon training be done at?

Yesterday on the Ask Coach Parry Podcast we chatted about how to pick the right Comrades Marathon training programme for you for. Today we talk about the training pace and intensities that people should be running their various different Comrades Marathon training runs at within those different Comrades Marathon training programmes.

Today Lindsey talks us through the thinking behind the different runs within the different training programmes.

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Brad Brown: Yesterday on the Ask Coach Parry Podcast we chatted about how to pick the right Comrades Marathon training programme for you for. Today we talk about the training pace and intensities that people should be running their various different Comrades Marathon training runs at within those different Comrades Marathon training programmes.

Today Lindsey talks us through the thinking behind the different runs within the different training programmes

Lindsey Parry: I'm gonna do it but without really giving you specifics of what pace you must run on each  Comrades Marathon programme otherwise I'm going to have to give you five separate answers.

Essentially, I am preparing you guys for being on the road for a long time at a consistent pace which is well below your maximum capability. Just because the maths is so easy for me, I am going to use the example of the 3 hour marathoner which should, with reasonable comfort, be able to run a 7h25 comrades. So a 3 hour marathoner should get a silver medal at the Comrades Marathon.

More runners should get Comrades Marathon Silver Medals

At the start of every year, there is in excess of 2000 runners that line up at the Comrades Marathon that are 3 hour marathoners, yet only 600 come home with silver medals. To get that 3 hour marathon they need to run just under 4.16 per kilometre, in fact it may be just under 4.17 per kilometre. But on race day they need to maintain just over 5 minutes per km.

For me, the Comrades Marathon is not about the speed at which you can run, it’s about holding a steady pace for a really long period of time. So the Comrades Marathon programmes revolve around the fact that we are going to do a lot of easy running with a little bit of intensity. But the intensity is designed more to create strength in your legs and also just to harden the legs up a little bit. Because when you have got to run for 89km’s, it’s going to get sore, so we do want our muscles to be strong and tough.

In terms of our physiological adaptation and preparing ourselves for being able to go km after km, half hour after half hour, hour after hour. We need to make sure that we run at an easy enough rate that we can get through the entire weeks’ training without our legs getting too tired, and being able to train the following week and not break down with injury.

It is important that you stick to the training paces on the Comrades Marathon programme. There are times in the programme where you will be allowed to “misbehave” and run a bit quicker – such as time trials, the odd scheduled races, some hill sessions, and in the silver programme some high intensity interval type of training.

Again, if you aren’t running at the correct Comrades Marathon training paces in your easy and your recovery runs, when you do get the opportunity to run hard and run fast your legs are going to be too tired to do those sessions properly, you’re not going to get the best out of those sessions. It is therefore actually critical that you stick to your training paces.

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