This is Ask Coach Parry and today we answer Colin’s 2 questions. He says he is a runner with a pb of 38 minutes for 10km’s, and 85 for a half marathon and 3:11 for a marathon.

His times don’t relate to his performances at the last 2 Comrades Marathon’s. His best is a 9:52 Comrades Marathon finish in the 2013 up run. He wants to know how can he improve his Comrades Marathon time? His aim for 2015 is Bill Rowan.

Secondly, in his build up to the Comrades Marathon he normally does 2 big races: the Cosmos 3-in-1 in early March (10km, 21km and 42km in one day. A total of 73km in one day), and then also the Loskop Ultra Marathon is mid April. Is it safe to do both or should he skip one of those big races?

Brad Brown: This is Ask Coach Parry and today we answer Colin’s 2 questions. He says he is a runner with a pb of 38 minutes for 10km’s, and 85 for a half marathon and 3:11 for a marathon.

His times don’t relate to his performances at the last 2 Comrades Marathon’s. His best is a 9:52 Comrades Marathon finish in the 2013 up run. He wants to know how can he improve his Comrades Marathon time? His aim for 2015 is Bill Rowan.

Secondly, in his build up to the Comrades Marathon he normally does 2 big races: the Cosmos 3-in-1 in early March (10km, 21km and 42km in one day. A total of 73km in one day), and then also the Loskop Ultra Marathon is mid April. Is it safe to do both or should he skip one of those big races?

Lindsey Parry: Those 2 questions tie into each other. On the face of it, it does look like he is doing enough training and certainly a good enough runner that he should be running a sub 8 at the Comrades Marathon.
That means going into the Comrades Marathon race, if I have a look at the information he’s given us, he’s either got a really bad race plan (in other words he is going to hard in the first half), and/or he is starting the Comrades Marathon tired.

What to be careful of:

We know that if you start out too hard and too fast at the Comrades Marathon you will lose time – hand over fist – in the second half. There are a lot of people who swear by the March Cosmos 3-in-1. In his wording he said “2 big races leading up to the Comrades Marathon”, so that tells me that he is quite possibly doing that too hard.

If you are going to have such a big weekend with such an enormous amount of mileage so early in the year, you have really got to be mindful of how you tackle that. It’s got to be really really really easy.

As a super slow, easy, long training run. Then he races again in mid April. That is about 6 weeks after the Cosmos 3-in-1, so from a timing point of view I am quite happy with that. And it is 6 weeks before the Comrades Marathon, so again I am getting a sense here that he is perhaps running that too hard.

That needs to be run quite easy and as a training pace at the absolute quickest – at planned Comrades Marathon race pace. That is what he should be doing that in. That should be his final test run.

He talks about 2 big races but he doesn’t then say if after that if he perhaps does another long run, so there is a little bit of information missing here again to stop me from giving him a full answer.

From the information he’s given me here, I suspect his race plan isn’t what it should be and that he is running those 2 races too hard, and that means that he is lining up tired.