Three weeks before the 99th Up Run starts outside Durban City Hall on Sunday 14 June, the 21,633-runner Comrades field has hit the formal start of its taper. South Africa's coaching desks — Coach Parry, A-Team Coaching, Runner's World South Africa and the Comrades Marathon Association's own training-plan team — pushed their final taper guides out to subscribers on Friday and Saturday, with the consistent message that the pre-race fortnight is now about freshness rather than fitness. CMA chief medical officer Dr Jeremy Boulter told a Friday morning briefing that mileage cuts of 25 to 30 per cent this week and a further 40 per cent next week were the rough shape of the recommended ramp-down.
The Up Run profile complicates the picture. Where a Down Run lets runners lean on aerobic fitness, the 87-kilometre climb to Pietermaritzburg punishes any weakness in eccentric strength or hill-specific durability. Coach Parry's three-week schedule, distributed to its 11,400 paying subscribers this weekend, leans heavily on short hill repeats with full recovery — six-by-90-second efforts on a 4 per cent grade is the headline session — and explicitly trims long runs to no more than 28 kilometres. The plan also pencils in two heat-acclimation sessions, with the long-range forecast for the Highveld pointing to mid-20 degrees on race-day morning before cooler air at the Polly Shortts finish.
The bigger field-wide concern this year is the run-walk strategy the CMA introduced at its November 2025 coaching summit, which has reshaped how seeded back-pack runners plan their day. Group 3 starters — set off at 05:30, half an hour after the gun — have been advised to take 60-second walk breaks every nine to ten minutes from the start, particularly through Cowies Hill and Field's Hill. Race-day pacing tables published by the Comrades Race Office on Wednesday reflect the new strategy and have been received well in the official Comrades runners' WhatsApp groups, where the chatter this week has been about run-walk discipline rather than goal times.
On the elite side, Gerda Steyn confirmed her final hard session on Tuesday morning and is now in pre-race quiet mode at her Pretoria training base, with coach Nick Bester saying her last 30-kilometre run sat at 3:45 per kilometre — comfortably inside the Up Run record splits she set in 2023. On the men's side, Edward Mothibi has flown into Durban from his Lesotho high-altitude camp and Tete Dijana is recovering from a minor calf flare-up that, per CMA elite manager Sello Maduma, will not affect his start. Both elite groups will gather at the Durban International Convention Centre for the annual seeded runners' briefing on Friday 13 June.
Three-week-out form for the broader field is, in the CMA's own data, the strongest predictor of finish-time variance on race day. The race office's database, which now covers a decade of qualifier-to-finish-time data across 138,000 runners, points to the next fortnight as the period where most sub-11-hour bids are won or lost. Race-week logistics — bib pickup at the Durban ICC, the spectator shuttle through Hillcrest, and the seeded runners' breakfast at the Royal Hotel — were confirmed on Friday and have not changed materially from 2025. Running Lookout will publish a two-weeks-out feature next Friday and full pre-race coverage in the week of 8 to 14 June.