“Everyone has a plan till they get punched in the face.”

That quote is attributed to Mike Tyson, it’s maybe not even what he actually said as it seems to alternate between “face/mouth”. It’s also difficult to do detailed research on this as it said in an interview and not a live press conference. I quickly gave up trying to confirm it, as the internet is full of twitter videos of him actually punching someone in the face (mostly a passenger on a plane, clearly didn’t want the aisle seat?). We’re going down the wrong track here far too quickly, but it’s a fitting metaphor. I had a nicely laid out plan for this blog mini-series and what to write. Then I got the flu, and that changed both my program and my desire to open a computer for a good 72 hours. The quick news is that it is the night before the Slave Route Half marathon and I will not be running it in jeanpants. I won’t be doing anything more taxing than making tea (I gave my entry away on Friday already). We have lovely children who sometimes come with germs and for a brief period we got to reminisce what it was like during that wonderful lockdown of 2020s when the 75% of the family had covid. I’m definitely not here to talk about vaccines (there’s no desire for this blog to go viral), but in hindsight would have got the flu jab as a precaution measure to my overall running plan.

So back to the plan then (well keep coming back to see how these reports go, but) how does this affect my training/race strategy? More importantly, what is my training/race strategy?

I’ve always done a bit of this and a bit of that. Living in Cape Town and right by the sea I like to think that I can be on the water/ in the mountains /on a bike (delete where applicable by time/weather available). It’s too windy you say…well I do windsports too, because that’s like not skiing in a snowresort! If you’ve been around long enough to remember the Totalsports challenge, a 7 leg relay event from Gordon’s Bay to Kleinmond – I did it as a solo 5 times, even won prize money sometimes!

Having a family was a real adjustment in my outdoor activities but the sport(s) I’ve done most over the last decade was Adventure Racing. This is “the greatest team sport you’ve never heard of”, and always impossible to describe in a nutshell. For this context, I’ll be in a mixed gender team of four. We move together non-stop through sections of paddling/mountainbiking and mountain trekking with the organization moving our gear as transition between disciplines. There is no marked route but checkpoints we need to navigate to using only a map and compass (so yes no gps/google earth/phone a friend). The big event is an annual ~500km race, which will us take 4-6 days to complete with an average of 2/3 hours of broken sleep each night.

Team Rustproof AR on day 2 of ARWC

Sounds crazy, you bet! We obviously can’t move at lightning speed for this period of time, so it’s moderate riding and fast trekking until the wheels start falling off. The team can only move as fast as the slowest member, so we look after whoever that is at that particular time. We take turns to be tired/sore/sense of humourless but also get to travel through parts of the country and promise you’d never be taken to otherwise. Bruce F even did one once. 2023 was the turn of South Africa to host our first ever World Champs, and I threw myself into this more than ever before with a supportive family totally behind me. To fit into the global calendar we actually had 16 months to plan for this race but I started about 10kgs in reserve and a niggly achilles that wasn’t fixing itself like these things normally do. For the first time ever I actually went to physio, did the recommended exercises and signed up and still attend a weekly pilates class. I managed to trim down and stay injury free, and I even have a biokineticist that I haven’t visited for months but am ready to go to in a heartbeat if things don’t feel right. ARWC was late October with 100+ teams from 60+ countries, an experience of a lifetime. The ~900km course ending in Cape St Francis took us 8 days and 8 hours, and I was cheeky enough to do a parkrun the next morning (blister management just about satisfactory). I felt like I had some well deserved rest lined up, but an incredible base to keep for the next big thing which was of course Comrades in June.

didn't monitor the scale closely, but the belt records 10sm of shrinkage

In hindsight I can see I was overconfident for this challenge for two large reasons.

* Long duration road running was no longer in my conditioning
* I picked up tickbite fever somewhere on the course and it klapped me
Let’s look at the second only, as I’ll get to the first in another post. We go bundu bashing through the veld and sometimes just sleep in a comfy looking spot in the gamadoelas. I’ve got it from 2 races before in the past, so jumped on getting the right medication as soon as I suspected it. My previous experience was that it just made you really tired but you could bounce back pretty quickly, but this race we got incredibly hungry and I think my body/metabolism might have been in a bit of shock from starvation.

I’ve never had a defined training plan for anything, but rather went on what felt right and was available and most of all fun. A GPS to record everything and a handy platform to monitor it all is incredible to co-ordinate this all better. As a team we all use Strava to help monitor each other, celebrate big sessions and “nudge” those who need to pull up their socks. I hadn’t realized it at first, but Strava premium gives you rudimentary coaching diagnostics that you can use to analyse training load/recovery and “overall fitness”. I don’t know how much intelligence it really has, they just ask for your sex, age and weight and I’d only use it as a rough guide; but the graphics do show some interesting things.

Strava diagnostics

As you can see it took a long time to build up fitness that was then totally wiped out in 6 weeks. I can add a massive pinch of salt here; while I’ll try to record all my training/races on my watch I can’t use it for adventure races because it’s a GPS so banned and wouldn’t have the battery life to last 200 hours. We did have a team recorder that was allowed, but I’m not sure if any of those metrics record in for me as it’s just one big activity (Discovery definitely didn’t reward me with a free coffee, but that’s ok).

What’s my point, when I started running properly again in January, I might have been starting from a much lower base than I envisioned. Probably a good thing I did a fair bit of Cederberg hiking first in the December break.

I considered the two training plan extremes of winging it (with additional advice at the running club bar) and getting an actual coach. The middle ground was to pick one of the training schedules you download off the Comrades website. I went for this, they’re done by Lindsay Parry the “official coach of Comrades” who has been in this game for a while. It’s free, but obviously very generalised and limited to the goal time you have in mind. My thinking was to see if this worked for me for two months and then reassess. It really slotted into my thumbsuck of building up mileage gradually with a qualifying marathon end of march ( Two oceans idea came later). That is how I got three A4 pages stuck to the inside of my cupboard door. I’d look at them every day, taking it week by week, and adjusting my schedule and plans for the coming days. Every 6 weeks I’d take them down and physically compare my actual time on foot/distance to the goal.

That’s a plan, do what you can. I’ve had a full week of zero running now three weeks out from race day, which is not in the schedule. Could have been better, could have been worse and no point worrying about what you can’t change. The one thing I know is that you definitely don’t try cram it back so late in the game!