Welcome to another edition of Ask Coach Parry. Today we have an anonymous question from someone who wants to run Two Oceans Ultra next year 2015. She says she is a 33 year old female, she’s been running on and off for the last 5 years.

She is 1.65m tall and currently weighs 62kg. Her current 5km pb is just under 33 min and her pb for 10km is just under 72. She tries to run 3 to 4 times a week with one 10km thrown in there as her long run. She also spins 3 times a week and tries to swim twice a week.

She is working hard on her 5km time trial session to improve her speed as you suggest in the podcasts that we have done. What she wants to know is how much should she be running now and when should she start upping the training?

Do you have a Two Oceans programme she can follow or can she modify one of the Comrades Marathon training programme, and if so how can she go about doing that?

Brad Brown: Welcome to another edition of Ask Coach Parry. Today we have an anonymous question from someone who wants to run Two Oceans Ultra next year 2015. She says she is a 33 year old female, she’s been running on and off for the last 5 years.

She is 1.65m tall and currently weighs 62kg. Her current 5km pb is just under 33 min and her pb for 10km is just under 72. She tries to run 3 to 4 times a week with one 10km thrown in there as her long run. She also spins 3 times a week and tries to swim twice a week.

She is working hard on her 5km time trial session to improve her speed as you suggest in the podcasts that we have done. What she wants to know is how much should she be running now and when should she start upping the training?

Do you have a Two Oceans programme she can follow or can she modify one of the Comrades Marathon training programme, and if so how can she go about doing that?

How much should you run?

Lindsey Parry: Firstly, she definitely needs to start upping her running from now. 3 to 4 times a week needs to become 4 times a week. And she needs to get runs building up now over time so that she is doing basically 3 runs of between 8 and 12km’s a week and one longer run.

She needs to build herself up to be able to run a half marathon early-ish next year so that she can be in a position to run a marathon before the closing date for Two Oceans qualifiers. Which, unfortunately I do not have the exact date now but it is usually the first week in March.

And in terms of what programmes to follow; she can follow the Comrades Marathon finishers programme. And the way the Comrades Marathon programmes are designed is to normally take in a 50km race or long training run 6 weeks before the Comrades Marathon.

In 2015 Two Oceans is 8 weeks before. What she will just need to do is move 2 weeks ahead on the Comrades Marathon training programme. The new programmes will be going up on the website shortly, I have almost finished with them.

If she follows that then she will be in a decent position to a) qualify for Two Oceans and b) finish it when she does take it on.