Coming up in this edition of the Ask Coach Parry podcast we look at the use of gadgets to help your running. Lindsey gets asked by a Comrades Marathon novice if they are a necessity? The simple answer is no, the more useful and fun answer can be heard or read in this ACP episode.

Welcome to the next edition of the Ask Coach Parry podcast, Comrades coach, Lindsey Parry is with us once again. My name is Brad Brown, welcome to it. Lindsey, before we get into today’s question, we’ve got some exciting news. We’ve got some giveaways to give away here on the podcast and it’s pretty easy to win. There’s a Nokia Lumia 640 up for grabs, there’s also a Fitbit that some lucky runner could win.

All we’re asking people to do over the next week is if you go out for a run, Tweet us and use the #AchieveMore. You can do it on Facebook as well. So it’s #AchieveMore. Don’t forget to tag either Lindsey or Ask Coach Parry in those Tweets and Facebook messages as well. We’d love to find out what you’re doing and obviously the person who Tweets and hashtags the most, the better. So it’s #AchieveMore.

Are gadgets the way to go at Comrades?

Lindsey, welcome onto the show, great question in today from Samantha. She says a Comrades newbie in 2016, out and out novice. She’s just recently started running, but she’s seeing everybody is running with gadgets and watches and phones and she’s been told she needs something. There’s obviously a lot of things on the market, what would you suggest? Is it necessary, first of all, do you have to have high tech gadgetry to run Comrades and if it is, what’s some of the things you would suggest she checks out?

While not necessary gadgets are useful

Lindsey Parry: Look, you definitely don’t have to have it to run the Comrades Marathon, but it really is just so useful and fun to track your stuff online. Or a device that you then upload online because then you get to keep an electronic diary. You can look back and these days most of the products also have GPS in them, so you not only get to track your runs and how fast they are, but you actually get to see exactly where you ran. You kind of rack up a database of places that you have run in around the world.

Look, I would say it’s very useful, obviously at the beginning you probably don’t need to go for highly expensive devices. But the more involved you get in running and the more information you want, obviously the more expensive the products do become. The Fitbit that we will be giving away over the next series of podcasts is a really nice, handy basic tool just to give you a real idea of how much activity you are doing.

There are really great running gadgets out there

Then look, there’s such great ways now of tracking, Garmin, if we use them as an example, you upload their stuff to their website. They now also have an app which you can download on your phone and the really cool thing about this app is you can do it across all platforms. So whether you’re Android, whether you’re Apple, whether you’re Microsoft, you get access to the Garmin Connect on your phone. You can create a little community with your training partners around you. So you can actually see when you or your training partners are slacking off. It’s just technology creates a really nice motivational tool to almost become your training partner on this journey.

BB: I love that, Samantha, check it out, absolutely. Don’t forget, if you are doing a training run this week, make sure you hashtag us on social media, #AchieveMore and you could win yourself one of those Fitbits or the new Nokia Lumia 640. Lindsey Parry, thank you very much, don’t forget, if you have a question you’d like answered here on the Ask Coach Parry podcast, all you need to do is head over to askcoachparry.com. You can submit the question there and who knows, we could be answering yours next time out.