I had the funniest experience last night that I just had to share. I attended the Rockies Road Runners Comrades 2010 panel talk at the Zoo Lake sports grounds. The speakers had a wealth of Comrades experience and knowledge and I thought it would be good to go learn from them. Included on the panel was 9 times Comrades winner Bruce Fordyce, Dan Oliver who is a running coach extraordinaire (He has also completed 19 Comrades marathons himself) and well known and highly respected sports physician Dr Jon Patricios. Don Oliver opened the meeting breaking down his training programme and Bruce Fordyce wrapped things up with a bit of a what to expect session and opened the floor for a bit of a Q&A session which was very entertaining and informative.

The amusing bit of the evening was the talk by Dr Jon Patricios. I first met Jon in November when I had picked up a strain of the peroneal tendon in my left foot. His talk last night was about the adaptation your body will go through to finish a race like Comrades. Obviously one of the biggest changes in your body will be the strengthening of your skeletal system and your muscles and tendons. My injury in November was my body not being able to adapt to the stresses and strains I was placing on it.

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To wrap up his talk Jon said it was important to be sensible in the build up and make sure the adaptation was gradual enough not to cause serious damage. In closing he used the following example to illustrate his point:  He said he saw a patient at the end of last year with an injury that was caused by a few things. This patient is a radio jock on one of the big radio stations and weighed about 145kg’s and was convinced he was going to run Comrades as part of their celebrity challenge (At which point the audience gasped). He went on to explain that this patient had broken down at the end of November and there was no ways that this guy was going to do it. I think the words he used were “reckless and irresponsible to think he could do this”. With that he wished everyone luck for their training and the race itself. At the interval Jon was chatting to one or two of the other runners that were using the opportunity to ask a few questions. I waited my turn, shook his hand (I could see he didn’t recognise me) and said that I was the reckless and irresponsible radio jock he was referring to. I corrected him and said that I was actually 160 odd kg’s when I started and that I was on track as far as my training was going. There is still a long was to go in my training and a lot of hard work to get me to the start line on 30 May but so far so good. I need to find out where his next talk is, that story he tells is just going to get better!

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