Comrades Marathon training: 90 road kilometres with the clock running against you

Comrades is the oldest ultra in the world and the biggest: about 90 kilometres of closed tarmac between Pietermaritzburg and Durban, run in alternate directions. The 2027 race, the hundredth, is a Down Run: 655 metres of altitude to lose, most of it in the second half, with the Big Five hills in the way. You have twelve hours from your gun, enforced to the second, and a cut-off at every stage with a bus waiting for anyone who misses one. Nine in ten starters finish. On the 2023 Down Run, the cut-offs that caught people came in the final 20 kilometres.

For a runner over 40 who has raced marathons, Comrades is the most reachable ultra in the library and the most unforgiving of a fast first hour.

A Down Run is a quad exam

Down means net descent, on tar, at a pace that stays close to running the whole way. Every downhill step is eccentric loading on the quads, and there are tens of thousands of them. The runner who has done their long runs on rolling trail arrives with legs that have never met sustained road descent and finds out on Fields Hill at 60 km. The protection is the repeated-bout effect: long downhill road runs through the build, progressed carefully, and heavy strength work through the winter so the muscle arrives with capacity to spare. The descents note covers how I progress it, and it applies to tarmac as much as mountains.

Twelve hours, by the clock

The cut-offs run on time of day and the organisers say plainly that they are operational requirements, not pacing targets. In 2026 the halfway cut at Drummond was 12:10 for a 05:00 to 05:30 start, and Umlaas Road at 67 km was 15:25. A twelve-hour runner has no slack anywhere, so the plan is even effort by heart rate, not even pace: walk the climbs deliberately with the heart rate under the cap, run the flats and descents at the effort you rehearsed, and hold the second half of every long run at the same effort as the first. The heart-rate note is the discipline; Comrades is where it pays.

Pinetown and Sherwood, on spent quads

The organiser does not publish where runners stop. After the 2023 Down Run it did apologise "to those runners who were affected by the cut-off times at Pinetown and Sherwood". A South African results blog worked through that race. Beating the Pinetown cut-off, at 68.9 km, took 6:16 per kilometre from Winston Park, and the blog says many believe most of the damage was done there. At Sherwood, with 6.4 km to go, 1,016 runners went through in the last ten minutes before the cut-off, and all but six of them finished. Both points come after Fields Hill, so the clock asks for pace just as the quads stop giving it. A British club runner who finished the 2018 Down Run in 8:15 wrote: "Fields chewed me up and spat me out at the bottom minus most of my snap but with plenty of doubts and fears in return."

Fuel from the tables

Forty-nine refreshment stations carry what the race carries: water, energy drink, cola, potatoes, bananas. Seconding is allowed only from a standing position, so the food you practise with is the food on the tables. Sixty grams of carbohydrate an hour from cola and potatoes is a trained skill, and the carbs note is where it starts. June in KwaZulu-Natal is winter: a cold start at five, warming to a pleasant day. Heat is rarely the story; the descent and the clock are.

Where durability shows up

Road running gives the cleanest watch data in the library, and Comrades is the race where late-run pace at the same heart rate tells me almost everything. What I read through a build is the second half of long runs against the first, the cost of long descents on the following days, and whether the athlete can hold an effort when the pace feels insultingly slow. The pattern I want by May is a runner who finishes long runs faster than they started them.

Twenty-two weeks of road, mostly downhill

I plan Comrades on my 100 km template: 22 weeks from mid-January to the 13 June start, with two strength sessions a week all the way through. Six weeks of capped easy base. Six of road build, with a spring marathon as the qualifier and the fitness marker. Seven of Down Run work. Three of taper.

Downhill road work starts in week one: three five-minute descents at a 5 to 10% grade, at least every second week. Through the spring they become longer continuous road descents inside the long run. The Pinetown finish puts the last 45 minutes of a long run at goal race effort, after the descents, because that is where the 2023 cut-offs asked for pace. Table-food fuelling uses cola and potatoes, with carbohydrate per hour rising by 10 g every one or two weeks to around 60, settled two weeks out. Long runs build about 10% at a time to around four hours, and back-to-back weekends peak at about four hours then two to three, three to four weeks before the race. The taper is three weeks, because the Down Run collects fatigue you carried in.

What I watch

• Pace at the same heart rate in the second half of long runs against the first.
• Quad soreness in the two days after long downhill road runs, and how that changes across the build.
• Uphill walking speed on road at the easy cap, because the Big Five are walked by most of the field.
• Carbohydrate per hour from race-table food on long runs, and the gut score.
• Whether the athlete can run the first hour slower than they want to.

Facts checked September 2026 against comrades.com: the 2027 Down Run on 13 June from Pietermaritzburg to Durban, distance about 90 km to be confirmed after measurement, 12 hours from the start gun, the 2026 cut-off times and 49 refreshment stations, medal times, a marathon qualifier under 5:00, fees, a 28,000 cap and finish rates of 89.8% in 2026 and 86.9% in 2025. The Big Five and the altitudes are from published route descriptions rather than the organiser's site, and the 2027 intermediate cut-offs had not been announced when this was checked. Where runners stop, checked October 2026: the organiser's apology over the 2023 Pinetown and Sherwood cut-offs is as reported by the Daily News and The Citizen; the Pinetown pace and Sherwood figures are from The Running Mann's analysis of the 2023 results (runningmann.co.za), a secondary source; the Fields Hill quote is from a club runner's published 2018 report and is colour, not data. Evidence level: the eccentric-loading and pacing physiology matches the field notes; the road and cut-off demands are the race's own; the build's week counts, doses and taper are my coaching method.