On this Monday edition of the Ask Coach Parry podcast we have had a couple of injury related questions. The first one comes from Raoul le Roux; and Raoul is saying, he picked up an injury, he hasn’t run for three weeks. In the build up to the Comrades Marathon this year he’s done four half marathons, two 32’s and one marathon and he’s totalled 970km from 1st January until now. He says he is receiving physio, if he takes a break from now until race day, does he have a chance to finish?

Then one from Gillian Innis saying that she broke a metatarsal bone in her right foot in September last year, only started in January again, he’s done 750km since then, no marathons, only halves and no ultras, she has entered the Comrades Marathon, she started in H batch last year and she missed the cut-off by 25 minutes. Should she give it a go this year or should she give it a skip?

On this Monday edition of the Ask Coach Parry podcast we have had a couple of injury related questions. The first one comes from Raoul le Roux; and Raoul is saying, he picked up an injury, he hasn’t run for three weeks. In the build up to the Comrades Marathon this year he’s done four half marathons, two 32’s and one marathon and he’s totalled 970km from 1st January until now. He says he is receiving physio, if he takes a break from now until race day, does he have a chance to finish?

Then one from Gillian Innis saying that she broke a metatarsal bone in her right foot in September last year, only started in January again, he’s done 750km since then, no marathons, only halves and no ultras, she has entered the Comrades Marathon, she started in H batch last year and she missed the cut-off by 25 minutes. Should she give it a go this year or should she give it a skip?

Lindsey Parry: Look, the first question, if he’s already missed three weeks from injury, and now he’s going to not be able to train for the next four weeks, then I wouldn’t line up. Even if he finishes, he’s really just going to have a miserable time, he’s not going to enjoy it at all. Even if he’s trained and he’s trained through this injury now and he’s had 900km at this point, four weeks of resting is quite a lot.

You won’t lose much in two weeks, in three weeks it starts to slide away quite quickly and by four weeks you’ve missed an enormous chunk. If he has been running up until now and now has just decided, let’s treat this injury and potentially going to miss 10 or a few more days and then he can just get in some consistent but short distances. So 5-8km but very consistently up to the final week, then maybe.

Maybe he has a little look-see and he can give it a go. Want to break the Comrades tape? Don’t waste time The one with the metatarsal, very light on kilos, and missed last year about 25 minutes, so I think that tells me this is a borderline athlete.

Why do people fail at the Comrades Marathon?

A lot of people miss it by that much because they don’t realise how much time they waste on race day and I think if she has a look, a think back to last year where she, besides the 6-8 whatever minutes she lost at the beginning, so let’s call it another 16 minutes that she lost, if she goes through her day and remembers all the times she stopped, she will realise where she went wrong.

But I just feel like someone who is very borderline and who is possibly, well definitely light on long runs, so I think from a 750km to now means that she’d probably get to race day pretty close to another 100km, so 850 is not a terrible number, it’s quite close to what I would consider the minimum, but what does concern me is that there are only half marathons in there, there are no marathons, there’s nothing in there that would have helped her endurance.

I just feel like with, it sounds like she’s a borderline finisher and I think she needs to do a slightly better training build up in this to have a realistic shot at Comrades.

BB: There we go, Gillian, thank you for that and the good news is the race is going nowhere, it will be there in 2016, it will be there in 2017, rather make sure you’re 100%, it’s not one of those races that you can fudge. I know I’ve tried and it’s not fun when you do. Best of luck, it’s a tough decision to make, but hopefully that helps a little bit. We’re back again tomorrow with another edition of the Ask Coach Parry podcast, until then, from the two of us, it’s cheers.