018: Comrades FOMO 2026 - Building the Power Plant

Training – the Engine

When preparing for Comrades, you train from summer into winter. This means that as days get shorter you start runs in darker and colder weather. There will come a day when you wake up and – despite loving the sport – hate the thought of having to get out of your comfortable, warm bed. The trick with your training, is to ensure that that day comes only when you hit your taper 2 to 4 weeks from race day. If you hit that day in early March, when bulk training starts to ramp up, you know you’re in for a rough ride. Then, revisit the recovery principles in the previous blog post to get back on track.

The common wisdom for Comrades is that your running mileage scales according to your goal time. If you want to beat the 12 hour cut-off, a runner should aim for 750km from 1 January until New Year’s Day. For 11 hours, 1000km should do the trick. 1250km should get you close to a sub-10 hour finish for a Robert Mtshali medal. 1500km is seen as the bare minimum for a Bill Rowan sub-9 medal and if you want to go for a Silver medal, you need to be aiming for around 2000km in the first 6 months of the year. Elite athletes (sub-6-hour Comrades) often run 250-300km per week in the peak of their training. Scarcely believable for mere mortals...

For my first Comrades, I ran 1070km in the six months before race day. I beat the expected 11 hour finish with a 10:45:06. In 2023, I ramped it up to 1350km, but missed sub-10 (on the shortest ever Down Run) with a 10:13:57. In 2024, I ran 1360km and slept half of what I did it in 2024 and, despite being on track for a 9:40 finish at 60km, I bombed my way to a 10:22:38 on the shortest ever Up Run.

I also averaged 5-6 runs a week between 2023 and 2024 and never felt recovered when a new week started.

In 2025, the common Comrades logic would dictate that I simply needed to train more to finally beat 10 hours. What I did, in fact, was to reduce my weekly runs to only 4 runs. This gave me an extra day of recovery and I ran to a Bill Rowan on a mere 1260km.

Here’s how I did it.

We will continue the Power Plant analogy from my previous post.

1. The Two Types of Training

Imagine your muscles are a power plant that supplies electricity (energy) to a city. That electricity is what your body calls Adenosine triphosphate (ATP) – or energy.

To make electricity, the plant burns two types of fuel:

• Carbohydrates. This is fuel that burns fast and runs out very quickly. Think of it like dry paper or kindling.

• Fat. This is fuel that burns slowly. On the plus side, you have huge stockpiles of it and it can keep the plant running for a very long time. Think of it like big logs.

The challenge is that logs are harder to burn than kindling and the plant needs the right machinery to use them efficiently. We’ll discuss the two types of fuel at length in the next post about nutrition and hydration and how to use your power plant.

The Workers: Mitochondria

Inside your muscle cells are tiny power generators called mitochondria. In the power plant analogy, they are the workers running the furnaces in the power plant.

Each worker can grab fuel (fat or carbs), burn it with oxygen and produce electricity (ATP/energy).

There are two ways to make your workers produce more energy:

1. Get more workers and make them work more furnaces.

2. Make the workers more efficient.

Here’s how the two types of training make it happen

Zone 2 Training – Easy, but steady.

(Side bar - I go into a lot of detail about Zones later, but for now, just know that Zone 2 training means that you're training at 60-70% of your maximum heart rate. This is the intensity you maintain while running and still being able to hold a comfortable conversation)

In the Power Plant: Zone 2 aerobic training builds more furnaces and hires more workers.

Over time your muscles contain more mitochondria, more fuel can be burned at once and your body becomes excellent at burning fat.

Instead of 10 workers running 10 furnaces, you now have 50 workers running 50 furnaces.

The workload gets spread out, so no one worker has to panic.

Hard / Threshold Training – Tasting blood? Good.

In the Power Plant: Hard workouts do something completely different. They teach the workers to operate the furnaces faster and better.

They learn to burn fuel faster, tolerate the smoke and heat (lactate) and keep producing electricity even when demand is huge (#noloadshedding).

This means that our workers become highly skilled operators, able to push the machines to their limits without the plant shutting down.

Why Both Are Important

If you only do easy training, you build a big factory with a huge capacity, but the workers aren't great at high-speed production and won’t know what to do when required to do so.

If you only do hard training, your workers are skilled, but there are too few of them working too few furnaces, so they get overwhelmed quickly when volume increases. They’re working in emergency mode. All day, every day.

The goal for endurance athletes is therefore to have a huge factory (many mitochondria from Zone 2) with highly skilled workers (efficiency from hard training).

When this system improves, your body can produce a lot of energy while mostly burning fat.

That means you save your limited carbohydrate supply for when you really need it: sprinting, climbing hills and/or the final push in a race.

You run the power plant mostly on logs, and keep the paper and kindling fuel for emergencies.

2. A Slow Upgrade

A second concept that is very important for endurance training is called progressive overload. Training is basically asking the power plant to supply more electricity than it’s currently comfortable producing.

Progressive overload is simply increasing the city’s electricity demand slowly over time. Instead of suddenly asking the plant to double its output, the city does something smarter.

The operators say, let’s increase demand 5% this week, add another neighborhood next month and later expand to a new industrial area.

Each time demand increases slightly, the power plant responds by upgrading.

How the Plant Upgrades Itself

When demand rises slightly but consistently, the plant makes improvements:

• More workers get hired → You build more mitochondria.

• Fuel delivery improves → Your body gets better at oxygen delivery and fat usage.

• Machines get reinforced → Tendons, bones, and muscles strengthen.

• Control systems improve → Your nervous system becomes more efficient and adept at interpreting warning signals.

However, upgrades take time. If demand increases slowly, the plant can adapt safely.

And the adaptation comes when you give the plant time to do maintenance work – or RECOVERY.

3. Upgrading the infrastructure

Strength work is an oft-discussed topic in endurance training for its effectiveness. The main idea behind it is to augment your main training load with lower effort workouts. Some believe in only doing light weight workouts while others swear by the modern “Hyrox/ hybrid athlete” approach of lifting heavy and running far.

In the Power Plant: Strength work is like a building team that improves the infrastructure of the plant. They check that the foundation doesn’t crack and they check that only the most heavy duty bolts are used on all equipment. When the plant ramps up output, strength work ensures that the structure can actually handle it.

Runners don’t need to be jacked like a topless Hyrox athlete, but there are a few foundational movements that ensure the infrastructure is maintained.

The main thing to remember is that you run with one leg at a time, which means that it makes sense to train one leg at a time by doing unilateral strength work.

These include movements like:

• the dreaded Balkan duo

  • the Bulgarian split squat and

  • the Single-leg Romanian deadlift.

• Lunges (forward, reverse and lateral).

• Step-ups and step-downs mimic the stability required for up and downhill running.

• Weighted calf raises and weighted ankle dorsiflexion stretches stabilise the lower legs.

• Due to long hours of sitting:

  • adductor muscles also weaken which means that Copenhagen planks are the best way to bulletproof the insides of your thighs.

  • you need to make a concerted effort to activate the biggest muscle in your body, your glutes, by doing glute activation exercises such as single-leg glute bridges where you push from your bum and not your hammies. Game changer guaranteed.

• Core work will ensure good posture and upper body stability for long efforts.

• Basic upper body movements like push-ups and pull-ups will keep the upper body aligned enough without adding too much weight to your frame.

  
  

Do this 2 to 3 times a week when training mileage is low and 1 to 2 during peak training.

Form is more important than weight. Once form is solid, weight can be added. Even consistent bodyweight exercise goes a really long way.

Anything more than that, and you’re probably more ready to sign up for Hyrox than Comrades…

(Side bar - I threw shade at Hyrox three times now, but I am really curious to try it one day. I'll just keep my shirt on when I do it, though)

How I built my Power Plant in 2025:

Keeping all of the above in mind, I followed these principles to build my Power Plant:

• Know your Zones. Otherwise you fall into the grey zone of not pushing hard enough during tough workouts and going too hard during easy runs.

• Every run needs to serve a purpose. It either needed to increase the size of the power plant or make the workers more efficient. The ratio you’re looking to hit is 80% Zone 2 training and 20% higher intensity efforts.

• Choose one run per week to mimic race day. For Comrades, this is the long run.

• Build slowly and aim to reach peak training mileage and intensity in the first two weeks of May.

Recall at the start of this post I spoke about a day of feeling completely done with running.

You’ll know you hit the training mark when you reach May and only then feel gatvol  of running.

By then, you’ll hit the taper – the slow decrease of mileage.

The power plant uses the taper as the final preparation for race day. The fact that you know you nailed the bulk of your training, will make you super excited for race day and give your Control Room time to make all the necessary adjustments for race day.

A final note before we get stuck into training principles: if you've been keeping track, I'm doing 4 runs, 2 mobilitu sessions and 2 core sessions a week. That means every day, I need to be doing something and some days I need to do more than one workout. I have a rule: at least 5 minutes of working out every day. I've found that I never feel like an old Diesel bakkie in winter when I do even a little bit of exercise...

Now, let’s discuss my principles of solid training:

1. Know your Zones

Some context about Zones…

There are many ways to determine your running zones, but my favourite is to run a 10km on a flat route as hard as I possibly can. From this I get both my Heart Rate and Pace Zones

1. Heart Rate Zones

I take the maximum heart rate (HR) that I hit at the end of the run as my “max HR” that I put into a HR Zone calculator (link).

In January 2025, I ran a 44:41 10km where I hit a max HR of 197. I put this into the Strava app’s Training Zone Calculator which calculated the following HR Zones:

• Zone 1 (Recovery): <128bpm

• Zone 2 (Endurance): 128 – 160bpm

• Zone 3 (Tempo): 161 – 175bpm

• Zone 4 (Threshold): 176-192bpm

• Zone 5 (VO2 Max): >192bpm

2. Pace Zones

The Training Zone Calculator produced the following pace zones based on the 10km PB time.

• Zone 1 (Recovery): >5:52/km

• Zone 2 (Endurance): 5:03-5:52/km

• Zone 3 (Tempo): 4:32-5:02/km

• Zone 4 (Threshold): 4:15-4:31/km

• Zone 5 (VO2 Max): 4:00-4:15/km

• Zone 6 (Anaerobic): < 4:00/km

I use these zones to decide how hard a training run should be. I try and follow the 80:20 principle espoused by Matt Fitzgerald in his book, 80/20 Running. The idea is to do 80% in Zones 1 and 2 and sprinkle in higher intensity efforts in the remaining 20%.

Here’s a quote from Steve Magness – endurance coach extraordinaire – that captures it beautifully:

This approach requires brutal honesty. When it comes to Zone 2 training, you sometimes need to walk to bring your heart rate back into Zone 2. The evidence is there that it works, though. If you want to properly nerd out on the science, give this video a view. It summarises key findings from large-scale academic studies.

2. Every run needs to serve a purpose

   
   

Common Comrades knowledge says that athletes who want to run a Bill Rowan or faster, need to run at least five times a week. I was limited to only running four times a week due to family commitments. I could sometimes sneak in the extra run, but the extra day of recovery really helped performance during the runs I did do.

Here are the four runs I did every week and the task they had to fulfill:

1. The Workout

Hill Repeats:

Hill repeats make for great workouts. They create extra resistance by forcing you to work against gravity. This added resistance also helps to improve running form.

In the Power Plant: Hill repeats equate to stress-testing the structure under load. They’re workouts that make the workers in the plant become more efficient at moving heavier loads. They don’t just make the plant more powerful, they make it harder to break.

The feeling I get after a hill repeat session is that my muscles are like elastic bands that have been wound up and are ready to be released on flat routes.

My favourite hill workout is one where I do 4 x 1min repeats, 6 x 45sec repeats and 8 x 30sec repeats. My goal is to run every interval as hard as possible. This means that my Gradient Adjusted Pace (GAP) – a measure of how fast you would’ve run if it were a flat stretch of road – falls between 2:50/km and 3:30/km. It is tough work.

(Side bar - for the non-runner, 2:50/km is the pace Sebastian Sawe ran when he recently smashed through the 2-hour barrier for the marathon)

The recovery intervals are left open-ended, so if I'm wiped out from an effort, I'll give myself time to recover. When I'm feeling strong, though, I try to keep it no longer than 1.5 times the duration of the interval. So, if I ran an interval of 1 minute, I try to be back down the hill in 1 minute and 30 seconds.

The danger of hill repeats is that they are strenuous on your posterior chain. That means that they specifically target your hamstrings, calves and glutes (#bootyburn). There is also an increased injury risk. As Steve Magness puts it,

Don’t have him on speed dial.

I therefore balance hill sessions with other workouts.

Longer Interval Sessions:

My favourite is a 6 x 1k repeat where I aim for a pace between 4:15-4:30/km (my Zone 4 threshold pace) and 1 minute of recovery between intervals. (Strava pic)

In the Power Plant: Threshold intervals simulate where the plant can produce as much electricity as it can without the system becoming unstable. In the plant workers are at the point of becoming overwhelmed, fuel (kindling) needs to be provided fast and in high quantities and systems like conveyor belts (tendons) and engines (muscles) are under high stress. This builds the ability to sustain high output without overload and achieve better efficiency at race pace.

It teaches the plant: “This level of output is normal. We can live here.”

Tempo Runs:

Another slightly easier workout is a 8-12km Tempo runs (4:32-5:03/km).

In the Power Plant: Tempo runs are like running the plant at a strong, steady output for an extended period. In the plant, workers are busy, but not overwhelmed, fuel is being used steadily and systems are under pressure, but controlled. This builds endurance at higher intensity and – crucially – confidence in sustained effort.

It teaches the plant: “I can go long AND I can go fast.”

Progression Runs:

Finally, long progression runs (of 15-21km) that start at Zone 1 Recovery Pace and end at VO2 Max for a Fast Finish round off my arsenal of workouts. This is a very race-specific workout.

In the Power Plant: During the early kilo’s, the plant faces low demand and systems are settled. The system only runs on slow burning fuel. During the middle kilo’s, more systems engage and fuel types become more mixed. Finally, demand increases and all systems need to work together.

This builds pacing discipline, fuel timing under changing demand and finishing strength.

It teaches the plant: “Here’s how you increase output without shocking the system and how to function at a high capacity when you’re already stressed.”

How to know if it is working:

I measure the success of workouts during the recovery between intervals. At the start of the season, I need to walk for at least 20 seconds to regain my breath. As fitness improves, I only need to slow to a jog. Once this starts happening, I can make the workout harder by adding more repeats or making them longer.

I also know that it is working when my Pace and Heart Rate Zones align. This means that when I do a Tempo Run, my heart rate stays in the Tempo Zone and doesn't drift into Threshold.

A secret weapon:

Finally, I want to point to a secret weapon in the arsenal that I suspect many runners aren’t using as well as they can: the watch! Many runners have a masochistic relationship with their watch, but it doesn't have to be that way. My Garmin watch tracks all my metrics such as sleep, resting heart rate and recovery time between runs. This is then used to give a suggested workout for every day, with a short description of the reason for the suggestion. I’ve found that if I don’t feel quite up to a specific workout, I consult the suggested workout on my watch. If it suggests an easy or recovery run and notes that I seem to be recovering slowly, I swap out the workout for another run and do it later in the week.

Don’t wing it:

As noted in our analogy, the workout is the only way that we can condition our system to work under stress and make your workers more efficient. If you can’t do it properly, rather give your body an extra day or two and then smash it. I’ve also anecdotally found that the confidence gained from a good workout can easily be offset by even just a mediocre workout. So, don’t waste your weekly workout.

2. Trail Run

Comrades is an unbelievably hilly race. The 45km from Pietermaritzburg to Drummond has runners facing 800m of elevation gain on the Down Run. The most elevation gain for a marathon in Gauteng is the Pretoria Marathon with 660m. For comparison, here are other ultras and marathons in South Africa compared to first half of both the Up and Down Comrades.

The kicker with Comrades is that you then need to run another marathon. For the Up Run, it is the first half of the Down Run in reverse, which is already one of the toughest marathons in its own right. Everyone knows of the “Big Five” hills on the Up Run – Cowie’s, Fields, Botha’s, Inchanga and Polly Shortts. They are truly brutal hills, but there are hills without names that will blow up your power plant if you underestimate them. The one out of Camperdown past the chicken farms was particularly traumatic for me.

For the Down run, you need to have the muscular strength to run downhill for 40km after, ironically, ascending up to hell. To Comrades runners, it is known as Botha’s Hell (Hill). And the final insult to injury is that even on the down part of the Down run, your respite from the quad smashing downhills doesn’t come in flats, but in massive hills like Cowie’s Hill, the 10% incline nightmare into Westville (my least favourite hill on Comrades Up or Down - you can see me struggling up it at 18:45 of this video), 45^th Cutting, Mayville Offramp and Toll Gate Bridge.

I’m trying to make two points with this tirade:

1. The hills on Comrades will not and do not stop. You need to know what that feels like in training.

2. Because there are so many hills on Comrades, you cannot attack them with maximum force. The only way to survive them, is to become silently efficient and grind them out without blowing up the power plant.

The elevation goal

So, how do you prepare yourself for all the hills on Comrades? A simple heuristic I follow is to hit 15m of elevation gain for every kilometer run. So, if I run 50km in a week, I try to do 750m of elevation. This is for the Down run and for the Up run, I try to get to 18m of elevation gain.

Hitting this goal on the road can be challenging, especially if you do not live in a hilly area.

Enter: the Trail Run.

Trail Running is often viewed as a whole different sport by road runners (see this earlier blog post for some insights into how trail runners and road runners differ), but I’ve found it to be an unmissable complementary component to achieving my road running goals.

Firstly, trail running is lower impact, since you run on dirt roads at slower speeds. In the power plant, this means that you can build the efficiency of your power plant with less mechanical wear per cycle.

Secondly, it is a completely different mental exercise. You need to focus a lot closer to your feet on technical sections. In short, you become a lot more aware of your proprioception – how your body moves in space.

By changing the training modality slightly, other neural circuits are fired that cause this mind-body connection to be strengthened. And, quite frankly, it breaks the monotony of another traipse down the road.

In the power plant, this is like upgrading the real-time control systems inside the machinery, by making sensors more sensitive and error correction to happen fast.

Thirdly, it provides hill efficiency without shocking the system like hill repeats do, since you get frequent, moderate increases in resistance (on most trails). In the power plant, this means that you can teach the plant that hills are part of the job and not a shock to the system.

I repeat: for Comrades, trail running is all about the HILLS.

In the context of the power plant analogy, the introduction of a trail run into the training mix is like teaching the plant to run effectively with constantly changing demands versus the more predictable demands of road running. The Control Room learns to calibrate instruments for a wider variety of scenarios.

The Wolf Plan

My local trail is Wolwespruit Trail and Bike Park. It offers a 4.5km and 6.5km trail that can be combined to create a 10km route. It has roughly 300m elevation gain.

Trail running is mostly about adventure and exploring new places, but for my purposes, I try to run the same route at Wolwe as a reference point during the week.

In summary, the Trail Run adds a low impact way to improve Zone 2 fitness and build hill climbing efficiency. During Comrades 2025, I knew that I was well prepared for hill running when I ran out all of Inchanga (while chatting to anyone who would listen) and managed to run at close to 5:00/km over the infamous Mayville offramp in pursuit of the 9 hour bus at 82km.

I do, however, want to run the whole Comrades at least once in my life without any walk breaks. That means that I need to have the ability to still run the hills in the last 20km. The trail run will be key to achieving that goal in future.

3. The Easy Run

The “Easy Run” can be the most difficult run to nail, since it requires a lot of self discipline to do it easy enough. These runs are pure Zone 2 with no spikes in effort, no surges and no instability. Elevation gain is moderate (8-12m of elevation per km of running). These runs are purely for building more mitochondria (recruiting more power plant workers), improving fat burning and increasing efficiency at low effort.

In the power plant analogy, the Easy Run is when the plant is running steady, moderate demand for a meaningful stretch of time. Workers are active but not strained, and the furnaces are burning large logs. This teaches the plant to quietly grow bigger without triggering damage or fatigue.

Additional benefits can also be reaped if you do your Easy Run just a little longer than comfortable. This builds durability, resilience to fatigue and comfort with sustained movement. The Easy Run teaches the plant that staying on for long is normal.

Because intensity is low, fueling doesn’t need to be aggressive and hydration is easy to maintain.

In the power plant, it’s like running the delivery system under ideal conditions with no urgency, no bottlenecks and smooth flow. It improves baseline fuel usage, efficiency and consistency. So when demand increases during your Workouts and Long Runs, the system already knows how to flow smoothly.

My goal with the Easy Run is to slowly increase distance and maintain Zone 2 running all the way. I’ve learned that by starting really slowly and easing into the run, HR tends to stay lower for longer. For Easy Runs, my mantra is,

In 2025, my Easy Run peaked at 20km, but was generally between 14 and 16km.

The structure of my week is to run the workout on a Tuesday, the trail run on a Wednesday and the Easy Run on a Thursday. This method of “let the pace come to you” also feels amazing on tired legs and gives your body time to feel and adapt to running on fatigued legs without having to stress it with pace goals.

It’s also a wonderful run to build interoception since it requires complete honesty with the HR monitor: if you stray beyond Z2, you walk. It’s that simple. I’ve managed to tune this connection to such an extent that I can predict my HR to within 2 or 3 bpm at any given point in a run.

4. The Long Run

The Long Run is the most important opportunity every week to build your power plant and prepare yourself for race day. In my earlier years of Comrades, I would simply plod along to “get time on the legs” paying zero attention to what I’m doing and how I’m doing it.

In the power plant analogy, the long run is the only session that meaningfully stresses the entire system at once, for a long time.

Short workouts are like turning the plant on, ramping up and shutting it down. The long run asks that the power plant stay online, without breaks and to keep production running. This matters because endurance events aren’t about peak output – they’re about not shutting down.

Long runs force you to make your fuel strategy work. In shorter sessions, you can wing low fuel, poor hydration and sloppy timing. Your body can simply dip into reserves and survive. The long run will expose any issues in fueling and hydration.

Long runs strengthen the machinery under load. Short sessions don’t fully stress tendons, joints and connective tissue. The long run does low-to-moderate stress, repeated thousands of times.

This builds durable legs which manifests in becoming hill-resistant – up and own. You become more impact tolerant. I equate it to getting used to that “scrambled eggs” feeling of plodding down a long hill. If you’ve ever been spit out into Pinetown after slogging down Field’s Hill, you’ll also know the feeling…

A long run also trains the Control Room. The long run is where doubt shows up, boredom creeps in and small discomforts grow. Nothing is urgent,  but everything is persistent. In the control room, you practice staying calm with warning lights on, sticking to the process and not overreacting.

There is a concept in endurance training called cardiac drift, where after two hours of exercise, your heart rate naturally increases due to less blood in your system caused by sweating. This means that even the easiest of efforts can drift from Zone 2 into Zone 3 and beyond during really long efforts - even when you start walking. The long run is the only time to know what that feels like when HR doesn't really obey expected patterns over long periods.

On Comrades day, I spent more than 60% of my total time in Zone 3 HR Zone. This would've felt way too uncomfortable if I hadn't conditioned myself to know that I always stray into Zone 3 during long runs. I would've left time on the road if I didn't know that my body reacts like that over long periods.

Finally, the long run teaches pacing. Pacing is like demand management in the plant. If you go out too hard, demand spikes early, fuel drains too fast and systems destabilize. If you go out controlled, the plant runs smoothly, the supply chain keeps up and output stays steady.

The long run teaches how much electricity the plant can sustainably produce.

Final thoughts on building the power plant

I have shared the principles of how I built my power plant for Comrades 2025. As I disclaimed at the start, I am not a coach. This is why I haven't gone into the minutiae of a training plan. I now believe in following the principles flexibly and do not advocate the following of a rigid training plan.

I know that more gains can be made if I am able to run 5-6 days a week and recover from the effort sufficiently. I'm not at that level. I'm also big for an ultrarunner: 191cm tall and 85kg on a light morning, but closer to 90kg throughout the year. That's a lot of force going through a running shoe. Couple it with a pretty busy life away from running, an extra recovery day starts to make a lot of sense. The proof is in the results that it worked: 2 x 10k PBs, a first sub-100 minute 21k PB, a 10 minute marathon PB and a Comrades Down PB of 1 hour and 17 minutes.

Running Comrades requires a massive power plant. If you can build one effectively you're bound to have a great day.

Before 2025 I followed a real "hit and hope" strategy - especially regarding long runs. I now know that all the other things around Comrades come a distant second to building an effective power plant.

No super shoe, no energy-efficient gel, no recovery protocol and no gung ho pacing strategy can save you if you don't have enough furnaces and workers (Z2 training) and don't have workers who are skilled enough (hard training).

Know how to build it and you might get to power a majestic city on race day.

In the final post of this series, I will cover how to use the power plant by using effective fueling and hydration.