On this edition of the Ask Coach Parry podcast and the question was submitted via our website, coachparry.com. Nicole got in touch said she'll be running her first Comrades Marathon come 31 May. She’s got two main concerns for race day though. The first one is, how to avoid cramping, and the second, how slow is slow?

Brad Brown: On this edition of the Ask Coach Parry podcast and the question was submitted via our website, coachparry.com. Nicole got in touch said she'll be running her first Comrades Marathon come 31 May. She’s got two main concerns for race day though. The first one is, how to avoid cramping, and the second, how slow is slow?
Her qualifying marathon was a 4:46 and she says she can comfortably run at 7min, 7m30s a kilometre but she's still afraid of not starting slow enough or starting too slow that she ends up not making it through the cut-off point. So I think it's a valid concern, particularly that second question. Lindsey, what's your thought?

Lindsey Parry: Ja, so look, based on your marathon time, you should be okay to finish the Comrades Marathon somewhere between 11:30 and say 11:40 odd and look, you do need to start slow. You need to start slow on the up run for two reasons; one is that it is all uphill, so you're running slowly anyway, and two you want to really keep your energy for the second half of the race where it is way easier to run, especially from 50km.

Start the Up run Slow - Crack on after 50km

My advice would be to you, if you run quite comfortably at 7min, 7m30s a kilometre, is to run closer to 7:30/km. Probably somewhere in the region of 7:20/km would be your running speed and then with a couple of walk breaks take that average down to about 7:30/km, 7:40-ish even.

Then the time that you want to start giving yourself a little bit of a buffer and getting a crack on is from 50km to about 65km's, by which point your legs will start to feel quite sore and you'll start doing a lot more walking.

You start losing a bit more time but if you're going to gamble on putting time in the bank or running too hard, that really needs to happen from 50km and not from the beginning.

BB: Awesome stuff. Nicole, thank you very much for your question, Lindsey, that you for your time today and we look forward to catching up again on the next edition of the Ask Coach Parry podcast. Until then from the two of us, it's cheers.