Cape Town Marathon Prep After Comrades

With the Comrades Marathon around the corner and everyone beginning to taper their training, we’ll suddenly find we have more time and energy to start thinking about what is next. First things first though – We want to avoid looking towards the next goal before we have completed the immediate one but it is good to have something in the diary, and to know what our objectives are as far as recovering and getting back into training after a major goal, which Comrades definitely is. After a long block of training towards a big target and all the physical and emotional toil that went into it, it is easy to experience a bit of a ‘hangover’, for lack of a better term, once the goal is accomplished. Suddenly, that thing that has been driving us for so many weeks and months is no longer there and a few necessary rest days can become a week, and then another week, and before we know it we have put on weight and lost all of that hard-earned fitness and endurance. So, having that clear target on which to turn the focus is essential and what better event than the picturesque but also fast, Cape Town Marathon. A perfect twenty weeks after Comrades? The bonus is that it also falls within the 2026 Two Oceans and Comrades qualifying period.

No matter who we are and how experienced a runner we are and also irrespective of how fast we finished Comrades, we need recovery time. It will definitely take quite a few days before we are no longer doing the stiff-legged shuffle but even if that happens in a day or two, it is a good idea to take the whole week post-Comrades off from running. By the following Sunday all the aches and pains will be gone but there is still a lot of underlying fatigue so, the first six weeks of our Cape Town training block are pretty gentle compared to what we were doing in the final eight weeks of our Comrades build. All the running is easy at around 65-75% of our maximum heart rate. This is a conversational pace and should never feel like we are running harder than a 6/10 on perceived effort. We are gradually adding a few minutes here and there and we will want to run on a more hilly route on our Wednesday session although we are definitely not pushing these hills and still don’t want to exceed 80% of maximum heart rate.

The key sessions during this period are actually the strength and stretch sessions. There are two of these every week and here we want to also gradually increase the intensity of each session on a week-by-week basis. This is the perfect period to work on our overall general strength but we definitely want to start gently and build into things. Everyone has different tastes when it comes to strength training and these sessions can vary from bodyweight sessions at home to heavier weight lifting sessions in the gym. The essential component should always be to work with good form and therefore not so heavy that we compromise this and to try to promote good range of motion through all the major joints. That is also only possible if we use weight that is comfortable for us to handle. The whole body should be included but not necessarily all in one session. The sessions should also not exceed an hour and can be as short as half of that.

We end this first phase of training with a half marathon event. This one is low stress without any targets but we do want to aim at running to our maximum capabilities as defined by our current level of conditioning. We want to pace the race well and finish strongly, aiming at an even split across both halves. We want to avoid going out too hard and fading in the second half but we also don’t want to find we did a massive negative split because that indicates that we probably didn’t start fast enough and had too much left at the finish. This event will be a time trial of sorts which we will use to determine our effort in the coming phase.

In phase two of our Cape Town Marathon build we will start to add some more specific work to build our aerobic threshold and also gradually add volume as we progress through the six weeks. The key session of the week is our Wednesday ‘Over and Under’ session. Here we are going to alternate running at slightly faster than our half marathon average from the end of Phase One, with a pace that is slightly slower. So, the hard efforts are not super hard, but the easier periods are not true recovery but rather just a slight easing of the pace. The target should be about 10-15 seconds per kilometre faster and 10-15 seconds slower than our half marathon average pace on the 27^th of July. Instead of speeding up in the following sessions, we are increasing the time that we hold the faster pace while maintaining the duration of the slower pace. So, our overall average for the set should gradually increase through the six weeks. The sets are all around 40 minutes in duration and should be preceded by 10-20 minutes of easy warming up and the same cooling down afterwards. Depending on time and level of experience the session should be at least an hour and up to an hour and a half.

Our weekends now have two runs with one being focused purely on an easy endurance session but the other includes a 20-30 tempo period where we are aiming to hold our goal marathon pace for the Cape Town Marathon. These we can do on a normal, solo training run or we can work in the local Park Run if we prefer to have company or competition for the effort portion of the session. As for Wednesday’s interval run, the tempo run should have 10-20 minutes of easy running on either side of the effort. The long, endurance sessions are relaxed at a conversational pace and we should always be aiming to finish these feeling like we could have done a bit more or gone a lot harder.

We end off this six week block with another half marathon as a time trial. This time we want to aim at running at our goal marathon pace. This should be a pace that is challenging but comfortable to hold for 21.1km.

Phase Three is the final block and where we will expect to make big improvements. The first phase was more about recovering and running the Comrades effort out of our legs. Phase Two was back into a more normal training schedule but it was in effect, preparing us for the Phase Three training. If we have successfully completed the first two phases with only one complete week off from running the week after Comrades, we will have retained a large amount of the hard-earned endurance that we built for the 90km between Pietermaritzburg and Durban. Much of that will translate into a strong run in Cape Town but we will also top that up with some specific marathon long sessions in our final six weeks.

First up though, are the Tuesday track sessions. Here are focusing on improving our bodies’ ability to handle lactate which is produced in the muscles when push the pace, which we are planning to do in the marathon. The 20 X 400m session is pretty simple. Here we want to run at twenty seconds per kilometre faster than our half marathon pace on the 7^th of September, which should be comfortably fast. Not so fast that we feel we are sprinting but fast enough to ensure that we are concentrating on a good strong running form and breathing hard by the finish. The first two or three should feel pretty comfortable but, by the end of the set, we should be fighting hard to hold the pace. That is because we are not allowing much recovery. The recover periods are a short 200m jog. No walking and no pausing for breath. We are creating lactate during the 400 intervals and then forcing the body to deal with it while not at complete rest.

The other session is called a Michigan Set and is a little more complicated than simply smashing out quarter miles. Our first interval is a 1600m at 30 seconds per km faster than our 21.1 average from the 7^th of September. We then have 2-3 minutes of active rest, walking on the track or field. We then do another 1600 interval but this one is at half marathon pace, which should feel a lot easier but in reality, is not that easy. Another 2-3 minutes rest before we run a 1200m, this time at another 5-10 seconds per kilometre faster than the 1^st 1600, before another 1600m at half marathon pace. Then we reduce the length of interval and increase the pace again to an 800m at a faster pace than the 1200 before another 21.1km race pace 1600m. One more 2-3 minute recovery before smashing out a 400m as fast as we can which, if we have done the rest of the session properly, should not end up much faster if at all than the 800!

On Wednesday we have two types of midweek long runs, the staple of any marathon training program. These should be about 1:30 in duration and mostly at an easy 65-75% of maximum heart rate kind of effort. In MLR1 we want to do 10 X :30 surge / :30 ease in the last half an hour. These are not sprints and complete recoveries, rather an moderate but building increase in pace and then an equally gradual relaxing of the effort before the next one. The first one or two should feel comfortable but the effort will feel increasingly tough as the set progresses. In MLR2 we want a 10-15:00 increasing of our pace to marathon goal pace in the last half an hour. This should not be an aggressive increasing if pace but rather a gradual surge up to our marathon race pace over about a minute before holding that until the end of the period.

For our weekends we are alternating between a long run with an easy day and a back-to-back weekend where we run long on both days. The long runs are as we have been doing, at a conversational pace that leaves us finishing feeling like we could have done some more. These are good sessions to experiment with fuelling and hydration.

The slightly shorter long runs ‘with MP’ are as for our MLR2 sessions where we want to finish with a period of goal marathon pace running. MP1 is a 30:00 period of goal race pace; MP2 is an hour of goal race pace and MP3 is only 20:00. These should all be done towards the end of these sessions so that there is just an easy 10-15 minutes left to run after the tempo period. On the Sunday after these MP sessions we will do a split run with an hour easy in the morning and another hour easy in the evening.

Our taper begins on the Sunday before the Cape Town Marathon with an easy 40 minutes and then the rest of the week that follows will be shorter and easy with only some sharpening and leg shake out type sessions that will have us fresh and ready to smash a marathon PB and, of course, secure ourselves a good Two Oceans and Comrades qualification and start batch seeding for 2026.