Ahead of the weekend we answer a question relating to time of day when it comes to training. Will training mainly in the evenings, have a negative impact on your race day? Coach Lindsey Parry is on hand to tell you all you need to know on the matter, on this episode of the Ask Coach Parry podcast.

Transcript

Brad Brown: Welcome back, this is the Ask Coach Parry podcast. A question in from Adam du Plooy today. Coach Lindsey, Adam wants to know; he says most of his training has been done in the evenings and his mornings start really early. He’s not able to do long sessions before work.

He wants to know will this have a negative impact on him on Comrades race day? He says he is going to be using May through to do all his sessions in the mornings. Does it make a difference whether you train at night or whether you train in the morning?

Lindsey Parry: Look, it shouldn’t make too much of a difference on race day and you know, we should actually train and do our key workout when we are feeling our best. In this scenario, it’s a work issue, it’s not necessarily that that’s the best time that he feels to train.

But in an ideal world, if you are a person that is more lively and awake, feels better, more sociable etc in the late afternoon, early evening. Then that’s probably the best time for you to do your key workouts. Similarly, if you are one of those people who jumps out of bed and feels amazing. That’s probably when you should be doing your workout.

Early races may feel a little odd on evening training

It is going to feel a little bit odd on race day if you’ve done all of your workouts in the afternoon. But from a performance point of view, it really shouldn’t make that much of a difference. It may make some psychological differences. If you’re prepared, you’re ready for the race and the excitement of the actual race that should not impact on what time you end up running on Comrades race day.

BB: Adam, thanks for the question, interesting one. Not one we’ve had before, so thank you very much for that. Lindsey, until next time, thank you very much for your time. Don’t forget, if you’d like to check out the Coach Parry online community, we’ve got a ton of video training in there. There’s a very active Facebook group as well, you get access to Lindsey. All you need to do is head over to coachparry.com/join, you can get all the details there. Until next time, from the two of us, it’s cheers.