SUMMER has well and truly arrived and it is the whole season that you will be allocating to Comrades training, plus a month of the coming winter.
As you build up your training, you will need to learn to be patient as you carefully build up your ability to run long distances.
Being sensible too is as important as you pace yourself in races, which allows you to recognise how far you have to run and what ability you have developed to do it.
Often in a race, runners come past you in the second half. You need to learn to be one of those runners who passes a lot of the field as the race progresses.
Start off slowly and understand your ability, knowing how long you can keep up a certain pace.
At this stage of training everything you do must be successful to build up your confidence. Therefore don’t do things that are likely to fail, which results in injury and lack of motivation.
When you are well prepared you never fail. This month we must concentrate on running a faster, yet sensible, 21km, feeling confident at the finish that you could well have carried on if asked to.
The target time this month, 2:06:00, is very much faster than last month, which was a slow 2:20:00 just to get used to the distance.
To achieve this faster time you must start to include a faster time trial over 8km each week. Your time for an 8km, which is the recommended distance, is 47 minutes.
This pace is 5,8min/km. The pace you are aiming for in your 21km this month is 6min/km. This plan sounds right as you will be running a shorter distance in the time trial, but faster.
You can’t suddenly just run faster on one special day/week, so you must increase your daily training speed just very slightly.
As an example, a 10km route during the week that was taking over an hour, say 65 minutes, should be sped up to just a touch under the hour at 59 minutes.
This is how you train for Comrades. Any increase in effort, be it speed or distance, must be gradual. That is how you improve your running without getting injured.
