The Comrades Marathon training programmes are an extremely well-constructed plan heading up to the big day. However all of us are forced to adapt our programme from time to time. On this episode of the Ask Coach Parry podcast, Comrades Coach, Lindsey Parry tells you how to get back on track. Is it a case of sooner rather than later?

Transcript

Welcome onto this edition of the Ask Coach Parry podcast, I’ve got Lindsey Parry with us once again. I’m Brad Brown. Lindsey, I pulled a question out of the member’s forum on the coachparry.com website and it was from Barbara. She says she’s running a marathon a week before your Comrades Marathon programme stipulates.

She ran a marathon on the 5th of September, on the 26th of September she ran an easy 27km, she raced a half marathon halfway through October, did a PB, hasn’t charged her watch, so she’s been running to feel, which is sometimes a great way to run.

She’s been training according to that Bronze programme of yours, but she wants to know, with her running a marathon a week earlier than your programme stipulates, she needs to drop a week’s training. Which week do you suggest she drops, must she drop the last week before the marathon, in the taper or how does she go about this?

ALL the training programme details are on the Comrades website

Lindsey Parry: I would go the sooner the better. So if you read through the whole programme on the website, it actually does clearly say there that if your race is at a different time, either later or earlier, then what you want to do is to take my programme, put it in the new days and work backwards, as far back as you can, with how much time you’ve got available.

I would be inclined to say, that means her marathon is in three weeks’ time, so I would pretty much skip this week, because it’s important to get your taper in. You want to be fresh, it’s your main race of the year or it’s your main qualifying event, looking at next year, you don’t want to fluff it up.

You want to line up fresh, you want to line up with no niggles, so you would make sure you get your taper and then work backwards from there. Effectively I would leave out that week as early as possible because then the jump from one week to the next week. The jump from the week that you missed, it’s not going to be a really big jump but you’re going to compromise your recovery at the end if you leave out one of the weeks too close to race week.

BB: Fantastic. Don’t forget, if you want to check out those members forums, you can get direct access to Lindsey, all you need to do is head over to coachparry.com, that’s the website, you can find out all the details, go check it out. Until the next time, from the two of us, it’s cheers.