Brad Brown: Welcome back to the Ask Coach Parry podcast, it’s been a week since the 2015 Comrades Marathon and we decided we were taking a week off and I think it was well deserved, particularly for coach Lindsey Parry. Lindsey, welcome back, have you had a good week?

Brad Brown: Welcome back to the Ask Coach Parry podcast, it’s been a week since the 2015 Comrades Marathon and we decided we were taking a week off and I think it was well deserved, particularly for coach Lindsey Parry. Lindsey, welcome back, have you had a good week?

Lindsey Parry: It’s been an awesome week, it’s been extremely busy. It’s amazing how hungry the South African public were for a home win. I know the men have brought us a few home wins the last couple of years, but the ladies haven’t brought one for 17 years.

That home win and not just a home win, but a one and two has really, it’s got so much interest. I see it’s still being carried in some newspapers, almost a week after the fact, so it’s been a very exciting week, it’s been lekker. I’ve enjoyed it a lot.

A coach for all shapes and sizes

BB: Lindsey, I’ve spoken to a few coaches over the past week for my radio gig. I’ve spoken to Stuart Baxter, obviously the outgoing Kaiser Chiefs coach, I’ve spoken to Geoffrey Toyana who was voted the best coach in South Africa this year as far as cricket goes. I’ve spoken to, just lots of coaches, but I must tell you, the favourite coach I’ve been chatting to this week is you.

I’m going to blow your trumpet because you won’t. For those people who don’t know, who haven’t heard yet, who have been living under a rock. You talk about that South Africa one, two, you coached both Caroline and Charne Bosman who finished one and two at Comrades 2015.

It’s something that you’ve been working really hard behind the scenes, you’re obviously the official Comrades Marathon coach as well, so you’ve helped thousands of people get their medals throughout the field and we’ve got a really cool letter this morning from one of those guys who was a novice.

He ran a sub 10:30 and almost exact split, he said your advice was amazing. So the cool thing is you get to work with both ends of the field, but you must be extremely proud of what Caroline’s achieved and let’s not write off what Charne did as well, two fantastic, fantastic performances there.

Negative splits come to the fore at 2015 Comrades

LP: It was incredible, it was so nice to be part of and to watch. When you work hard for something over a couple of months and then the plan gets executed almost to perfection. In Caroline’s case, actually even better than what the plan was, it’s really satisfying.

I must tell you that I’ve been doing this now, that was my ninth Comrades as the official Comrades coach and the most satisfying thing about it is the number of messages I’ve gotten of people that ran even or negative splits.

I’ve been trying to preach this for nine years and mostly I’ve been ridiculed as a heretic. I think people thought I was talking witchcraft, but finally and slowly but surely we are getting people to believe. Those that believe are running, I mean on the Up run, we’re talking about people running 10 minute negative splits, but so, so many people doing even splits. So that to me has been a really satisfying part of this year’s Comrades.

BB: Lindsey, I’ve been following what’s been going on in the Facebook groups, it’s obviously very active after Comrades. So many people saying that they blew up in the second half and when you actually go down and analyse what they did, they just went out way too fast.

I think a good example of saving yourself is Caroline. I don’t think too many people know this, but tell us about her splits from the top of Polly Shortts to the finish last Sunday?

LP: So she was the fastest person on the day, male or female, for the last 8km, faster than Gift Kelehe who won the race.

Interestingly, both Caroline and, well Caroline was the fastest on the day, but Charne was also about sixth or seventh fastest on the day. One of the males that I coach, Renier Grobbelaar that came 19th, he was also well inside the top 10 of fastest finishers over the last 8km.

Those last 8km, once you crest the top of Polly Shortts are all downhill. So if you’ve paced yourself well and you can run, you can fly down that section and obviously the better you pace yourself, the harder you can run down that section.

As I said, it’s really cool, I guess this is not a very modest thing to say, but it’s quite cool knowing that you were right all along.

BB: Lindsey you mentioned Renier as well, I wanted to bring him up because obviously Caroline and Charne have been in the spotlight with what you’ve done with them. They weren’t your fastest athletes on the day, Renier actually went a bit faster than Caroline, finished in the top 20 and you’re pretty sure that he will have a gold at Comrades before his running career is done.

Comrades coach lives up to his billing

LP: Absolutely, look, we were hoping for a gold this year, if we’re honest, the result was a little disappointing. But if we look at how the race panned out, how he ran, he had a good race, it was a bit PB on the Up run, it was his highest finish at Comrades. So there are a lot of positives to take out of it and certainly enough positives for me to still believe that this kid can definitely go on to run gold medals at the Comrades.

BB: I love it. Lindsey Parry, we’ve also been getting lots of requests from people about coaching and I don’t know if this is the platform to mention it, are you taking coaching clients? Because we’ve been getting tons of emails, if people do want to get in touch with you, if you are, what’s the best way to do it?

LP: I’m busy sorting things out at work, at the moment I am unfortunately chock block full with coaching and I learnt the hard way last year that if you take on too many, you just can’t deliver a service and it’s not good for you or the athletes. So right now, you can email me on coach.parry@gmail.com, you can get hold of us through the Run Talk SA forum.

You can get hold of me through the Ask Coach Parry forum, and I am busy putting together a list and I’m busy, I’m in discussions with my employer at the moment about how I can free up more time to be able to coach more people. So I will be making an announcement about that in the next two weeks and then I will be open for business and taking on new clients.

BB: Cool, so get on that list, coach.parry@gmail.com, you can tweet us as well, we’ll send you those details. Lindsey, congratulations once again, this is a slightly longer Ask Coach Parry podcast and I wanted it to be a bit self-indulgent because I think it was well deserved. Mate, I’m seriously, seriously proud of what you’ve done and I can’t wait to work with you and keep on working with you.

LP: Thanks man, it’s been an awesome experience working with you and now we just need to get someone to come on board and sponsor these podcasts so that we can continue providing a good service to all the runners.

BB: Speaking of which, that was something else I wanted to pop into the back end of this thing, for now, we are cutting it back to three days a week, just so that you are aware. Obviously a five day a week podcast takes a lot of time, a lot of resources and with things slowing down slightly after Comrades 2015, and hopefully we can bump it up back to five.

As Lindsey said, if we can get a sponsor and get somebody backing us, just to cover the costs, because there are big costs involved in putting these things together. We’ll get it up to five once again, but for now we’re going to pull back to three, but we’re not going anywhere, that’s the good news. We’ve had an amazing response and if you’ve got something out of these podcasts, if you wouldn’t mind just popping us an email as well.

You can email me, podcast@runtalksa.co.za or you can pop it to Lindsey. Just let us know what you’ve got out of these podcasts, how much they mean, it just gives us a little bit of ammo, if you like, when we do find a potential sponsor to say this is what it actually means to the runners.

If you wouldn’t mind just taking a couple of minutes out of your day and helping us out in that respect, it would be much appreciated. From myself, Brad Brown and Lindsey Parry, until next time, it’s cheers.