Are you worried about peaking too early for the Comrades Marathon? Have you got your build up wrong in the past? On this episode of the Ask Coach Parry podcast, we look at how your build up can affect your Comrades. While also giving you advice on getting to race day strong.

Transcript

This is the Ask Coach Parry podcast, my name is Brad Brown, Lindsey Parry with us. Let’s get straight into today’s question. It comes in from Mtunzi Dwanya. Ntunsi says, what are the signs that you may be peaking too early and if so, what can you do about it? Mtunzi says, I ran the Comrades Marathon in 2015, which he did not complete, feeling a bit tired and feeling like he had exhausted his best running and was coming off of his peak.

He should mention that he was down with flu after Loskop. He rested between that and Wally Hayward, he dragged himself through Wally and ended up only doing the half marathon, although he had entered the marathon.

He wants to avoid a repeat of that in 2016. It’s a good question because at this stage in your Comrades training, it’s very normal to feel tired. But you don’t want to be overdoing it and making sure that you put your best effort in basically a month out from race day.

Lindsey Parry: Loskop is a dangerous race for doing that because it has so much downhill, I mean most of the race is downhill until 40km. You do tend to get quite far ahead of whatever time you were aiming for because the running feels so easy. Which then gets you excited about your finishing time.

Then you probably end up running a very hard last 10km up a big mountain and down the other side. You have to be careful of Loskop and be quite strict with your pacing. Stick to what your Comrades plan is because you are racing it on tired legs and you’re running a lot of downhill. Downhill is damaging to the muscles. That then makes it harder to recover.

Pushing races too hard can lead to illness

But just listening to the whole story, to me it sounds very much like Loskop pushed way too hard. It’s absolutely normal to pick up illness after racing quite hard. Then, once he got sick, did not allow enough time to actually just recover properly, get healthy before you start training again. Literally slogged through training sessions and forced it.

There were quite a few mistakes that were made. To avoid that mistake, you want to go really nice and easy at Loskop. Make sure you’ve recovered well from that effort, stay healthy and then tick over. Follow a sensible, gradual tapered approach with a steep taper in the last two weeks. Then you should get to Comrades and have your best run there.

Incidentally, regardless of whether you do your long run four, five, or six weeks before race day. If you do that long run and run it really hard, you’re still going to feel its effects in Comrades. You are going to have tired legs when you run Comrades, so you have to do that run easy.

BB: Cool, there you go. Mtunzi, thank you very much for that question, much appreciated. I hope that helps and I hope you get to Comrades fighting fit and strong and you have a great race in 2016. Much appreciate the question and much appreciate you listening as well.

Thank you to everyone, don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast. If you want to leave us a rating or review, it really does help us in the ratings on iTunes. So if you wouldn’t mind doing that it would really help a lot. Thank you very much, until next time, from the two of us, it’s cheers.