Unless you still need to qualify, racing poses a major risk to your Comrades success. I see

and hear many conversations on Facebook, Twitter and at the Comrades road shows about people aiming to improve their seeding. This is one of the original Comrades sins.

In most cases, athletes can only hope to improve their seeding by one seeding pen – which effectively saves two minutes if you are at the back and a few seconds if you are near the front.

The effort required to gain those two minutes comes at a cost: Training is affected;

High risk of injury during or following the race; Increased risk of upper respiratory chest infections. All of these will cause a loss of performance on race day of more than two minutes – and with nine weeks to go, your training as well as a solid race plan will win you far more than two minutes on race day.

Reflecting on the pros and cons shows clearly that there are not many pros to racing in the coming weeks.

About 68% of the runners who do NOT complete Comrades, start with an injury. It’s not hard to imagine why … to finish the up run you need to run 87 000 steps, and starting with a sore knee will mean a very, very, very sore knee by 87 000 steps.

If you are injured, it is much more important to get the injury healed 100% than to get in your training. The stats prove this every year.

There are alternative forms

This, to me, is the single most important aspect in Comrades success. Maintaining your training at a constant load over a long period (10 – 12 weeks in March, April and May) will see better results than pushing too hard now and having to miss training due to injury.

Have confidence in your plan, ignore what others are doing (this is incidentally something I learnt from the “Comrades King” Bruce Fordyce) – and no matter how good you are feeling, make small sensible increments in mileage.

Often seen as a right of passage on the road to Comrades, this is really the training session that lets you know that Comrades is possible. For that reason, it is much more important psychologically than physically, and it can be argued that in some cases, it is physically not the best step in training.