Are you a back of the pack Comrades Marathon runner wanting to improve? Have you tried to re-look at your training, but are worried that it is still not right? On this episode of the Ask Coach Parry podcast, Lindsey is here to help. Find out good and bad ways of going about it.

Transcript

Brad Brown: Welcome back to this edition of the Ask Coach Parry podcast and a question in from Steven Ruben, Lindsey. Steven is saying, hi, I’m a back of the pack runner who is looking to try and increase his proximity from the back. I love the way he’s put that.

He says: I’ve been running for about two years now, failed to complete the Comrades Marathon, have a failed Comrades attempt to his name. He’s planning on running it again next year. That said, it feels as though a number of people are telling him what to do and where he went wrong.

His marathon time normally is around 4:47, he’s already changed training, now he’s running 4-5 times a week instead of six or seven. He’s also upping the amount of speed work he’s doing by running a hard 500m downhill, a flat recovery and then pushing it back up the hill.

He’s doing between three or four repeats twice a week. His long run is on weekends, normally between 18 and 30km and he’s looking to increase that over the next few weeks to 25-45. He also plans on including a 12-18km run during the week to increase his stamina.

Basically all I’m looking for is an indication that I’m on the correct or incorrect path. Lindsey, I think there’s a few things here. Obviously you’ve got the training programmes up on the Comrades Marathon website. He’s also listening to a lot of people and I want to touch on something at the end, but what’s your take on what Steven is doing?

A gradual approach to adapting training

Lindsey Parry: Look, he’s got some good elements in there. Steven, you’ve gone about making your changes in a reasonably sensible way. You want to get a bit faster and you have added a bit of high intensity work into your routine and I think you’ve done it in a fairly sensible way.

You haven’t suddenly started doing a massive amount of high intensity running, you are only doing it once a week. I must just caution you that doing fast downhill repeats while a really great way to do some eccentric loading and get really good adaptation, it is hell of a risky.

Just be a bit cautious around that, but you are being quite sensible. The other thing you did that was pretty sensible is to reduce your overall training volume when you did increase your intensity. In other words, bringing in the hard running, you responded by running fewer days in the week.

I think that’s a pretty good thing to do. The way that you’re going about increasing your long run over time, that’s also a sensible way of doing it. I must caution you there, you don’t want to get those long runs too long too soon.

Don’t get your long runs too long too soon

I don’t know what marathon you’re training for or where you’re going, but you don’t want to get them too long. Like the 45km training runs, for someone running a 4:47 marathon, that’s very, very long. I would only save that for one or two occasions in the peak Comrades training. Just be a little cautious on the long ones there and adding a longer one in the week, that’s also a fairly sensible idea.

I guess my main areas of concern for you are just to watch out those downhill repeats; don’t go too long and also be careful that you don’t start training too hard too soon. We had a similar question a few days ago, December is not really the time to be training like a mad man.

Because it leaves you in a bit of no man’s land in January and February. I want to add one quick thing there. Sometimes the saying ‘smarter not harder’ is really so true. If you can raise R5 000 for charity, you can get into a CC batch, that gets you way further down the field and obviously takes away a lot of risk in terms of doing the incorrect training.

I think Brad will finish this off, but I think I know where he’s going and you really do need to settle yourself on one source. Not take too much advice from too many different people and try and mix that all into one programme cause that’s going to be very difficult.

BB: Lindsey, that’s exactly what I wanted to say. Stephen, that’s one of the biggest things that I see people doing and the mistake pops up so often. There are lots of great coaches, there’s lots of great information about Comrades. But what I would urge you to do is find one person that you can listen to that advice. It’s so easy to try and crowd source your training, but taking little bits and pieces from various sources is not doing you any favours.

If you want to chat to Lindsey and find out more about the stuff that we’re doing on his website, there’s a ton of information there, just go to coachparry.com/join, we do online training seminars monthly, we do a whole bunch of Q&A sessions, all the details are there. Get to coachparry.com/join, check it out, if it’s for you, that’s great, if it’s not for you, that’s great too. But find one person that you can listen to and follow that advice to the T would be the advice I would give you. Until the next time, from myself Brad Brown and Lindsey Parry, it’s cheers.