Time ripe to start Comrades training

It is now time to start specific Comrades Marathon training. The 20 000-25 000 runners who are planning to run from Durban to Pietermaritzburg on June 16 this year will obviously have been training for many months now, indeed, some for many years. But now the key training period has arrived and it is these next two-and-a-half months which are the most important in any Comrades runner's calendar.

Obviously every runner will have a reasonable training foundation and will be training fairly regularly as we approach the end of the month. Only those who are extremely gifted and who selected their parents with great care will be able to start from scratch at this stage. But those who are less than happy with their training so far, or those who have had their training interrupted by injury, illness, or time constraints can take heart that all is far from lost and that there is more than enough time to train hard and well and achieve the time they set themselves in this year's Comrades Marathon.

The history of the Comrades, and indeed marathon running in general, is littered with examples of runners who were only able to start proper training at a seemingly hopelessly late stage and yet who were still able to run excellent races.

The 1973 Comrades champion, Dave Levick, thought that he would be fortunate to win a gold medal for finishing in the first 10. He gave himself no chance of winning the 1973 "down" run because he was only able to put in six decent weeks of training before the Comrades. As it was he ran his best Comrades ever, winning in a record and finishing stronger than anyone else in the race that day.

A torn quadricep muscle forced me to abandon the 1984 Pieter Korkie marathon in March. The injury lingered and I was only able to train at my usual level from April 1 onwards to race day on May 31. Like Levick, I gave myself almost no chance of winning the race and yet on race day I was strong, fast and deadly.

From the lessons of others and from my own experience, I have never forgotten the message: The key to a successful Comrades is not necessarily how hard you train, but how cunningly and correctly you time your hard training.

It is amazing how many runners try and reinvent the wheel. Believing that the rules of training and physiology do not apply to them, they steadfastly believe theirs will be the advantage if they attempt to train harder, earlier and longer than all others. They always fail and they often do not learn the lesson.

We now know that intense, specific training can only be sustained for about eight weeks, give or take a week. Intense, regular training brings about rapid improvement, weight loss and increased fitness for this time of year. However, if this training is kept up for too long, injury and illness are ever-present threats and far from being ready to race well, runners arrive at the start line stale and overtrained.

And to get stale isn't very difficult. From now on the evenings get longer and darker and the mornings colder. Already there is a chill in the dips and hollows on the roads on early morning training runs. Those in the Cape will be running in the rain; those inland along crunchy frosty paths. The training is hard and, even for a Comrades fanatic, it can become monotonous - and it has to go on day after day, sometimes twice a day. After a while the runs become a blur and the training week just one long training drag. This is the time that the famous British distance runner Brendon Foster called the time when "we wake up in the morning more tired than when we went to bed the night before".

The stress is not just physical. It is also a mental one. It is boring and at times dreadfully so, to just run and run. The stress is also transferred to all those around us. Business colleagues may find it irritating to see us yawning during meetings, or slumping glassy-eyed over our work. Family and friends can find our short-fused Prima Donna outbursts extremely annoying and, significantly, others might find a general lack of interest in cuddling or "rumpy-pumpy" quite insulting.

The effort and commitment became sustainable when they are made for this specific time and when an end is in sight. The end after about eight weeks, begins with a taper and the taper is a glorious cutting back when training eases and the body rests and relaxes for the 90km battle ahead.

Correctly timed, the Comrades build-up almost guarantees a good run. Poorly-timed and maintained for too long and the Comrades build-up becomes a waste of many months of hard work and results in a shattered Comrades dream.