Running Races

Runners are always warned not to race to often. In South Africa we are spoilt with many races and I usually have a few to choose from every weekend. Yet, this warning doesn’t apply to me at all. The main reason is that I just run to slow and that’s that. I can’t easily overdo the racing at my pace. So I do lots of races throughout the year, but these are run as normal training runs with the added bonus of great company and water points with nice goodies. I do however run a lot less races than I did 10 – 15 years ago.

There was a time when I would run 2 to 3 and sometimes even 4 races per week (Wednesday night race, Friday night race, Saturday morning race & Sunday morning race). This was all about chasing the race kilometers. But that was in a different life with a different body. Nowadays I choose to run a training run at home more often and don’t go to every possible race anymore. I don’t often run more than 15 – 20km on my own and don’t plan to run more than 25km like that this year. My plan for the rest of 2009 includes 2 x 20km and 2 x 25km training runs. I’m not likely to run further than 25km as a training run alone, although there are a 50km and a 100km run in the back of my mind, but that’s a different story.

From January 2010 to Comrades I’ll run quite a lot of races, but I’ll only treat one as a race. That will be my qualifying marathon and I suppose the Comrades itself, but I’m definitely not planning on racing the Comrades. All the others will be normal training runs with no tapering or other race specific stuff. They’ll be part of my normal weekly training and run at normal training pace. In my case this means there is no chance of overdoing the racing.