With many people still to get their Comrades Marathon qualifiers in, some are battling just to get the sub 5-hour qualifier done. On this episode of the Ask Coach Parry podcast, Lindsey gives you tips on how to improve. Whether that get’s you under five hours and turns you into a Comrades finisher, is up to you.

Transcript

Welcome to this addition of the Ask Coach Parry podcast, I’m Brad Brown, I’ve got Lindsey Parry with me once again. Lindsey, welcome, nice to touch base again. I put feelers out on social media a short while ago, just to get a few questions to run through on the podcast and two of them are almost exactly the same.

One is from Hilary Meyer and the other one is from Kwanxole and both of them are saying they’re struggling to qualify. Kwanxole said she did a marathon in 5:35, how can she improve this? Because she’s constantly running, but she just can’t seem to improve.

Hilary is saying she’s got a similar problem, she needs to qualify before May, but can’t seem to get herself faster. When she does speed work, she ends up hurting herself, she’s very frustrated. I think a lot of people are in this boat Lindsey, the marginal qualifiers. What advice can you give to that group of runners to get their qualify in for the Comrades Marathon?

What is causing you to miss out on qualifying?

Lindsey Parry: Look, this is a very good question, but a very difficult question to answer in this forum because they’re not really marginal qualifiers. It may well be that once they realise they’re not going to qualify, they are then giving up and walking into the finish.

Half an hour is a lot of time that needs to be made up before they can qualify and without actually having seen what they’re actually doing, I’m just going to assume for the moment, just based on some of the comments, that they are running enough.

A simple question of running more isn’t necessarily going to fix their problem and that they need to do some specifically targeted progressive type of speed work. Hills are generally a good way of doing that. They’re a bit safer.

How to get the intensity of your speed work right

So, particularly in the case of the caller that is injury prone, that really needs to be done under the guidance of a professional coach because the intensities have to be set just so, so that you don’t overdo it. As a kind of general rule, something that I can give you to at least have a guideline to work on. Is that if you go and run a 5km as hard as you can, then when you do speed work, or hill work, you would then go and run your repeats at a few seconds per K faster.

If you were doing 1km repeats, you would be between 3-6 seconds per km faster than your time trial pace. If you were doing 400’s, then you’d be between 8-12 seconds per km quicker than your 5km pace. If you were doing hill repeats of two minutes or so, then you’d probably aim to be in the region of three, maybe five seconds faster than your average pace on that 5km.

Then every 3-4 weeks you’d run a time trial for time and as your time trial time improves, that’s when you increase your speed work and that in combination with all the endurance running should bring you quite a lot faster.

Is your IronMan marathon an easy way into Comrades?

BB: Awesome stuff, great questions. My strategy this year Lindsey is to finish Ironman, there’s no cut off on the marathon on Ironman. I think you’ve got as much time as you need, obviously the cut off for the big race is 17 hours. But as long as you finish, if it takes you six hours to run the marathon, it’s still a Comrades qualifier. It’s a good strategy for me this year don’t you think?

LP: Well, it’ll work for you, but it’s the lazy way man!

BB: Or, if you’re a marginal qualifier, just go do an Ironman, that’s the easier way to do it, is it not?

LP: Yes, in fact that is a good point, but unfortunately, if you’re not capable of running the sub five, it does put pressure on you to finish the Comrades. If you are a marginal qualifier, that’s a good way to get yourself to the start line, but you’ve got to get yourself to the ability to run under five hours for Comrades, to have a realistic shot of finishing on the day.

BB: Absolutely. Also, don’t forget, if you have questions you’d like answered, obviously we can’t get to all the questions here on the podcast, but you can join the Coach Parry online community. All you need to do is head over to coachparry.com/join and you can get access to Lindsey within that programme as well, so go check it out, coachparry.com/join. Until next time, from the two of us, it’s cheers.