Thursday, September 6, 2007

My friend Yasso says....

...its time to start taking names.

I ran my Yasso 800 workout this morning, and it went great! For those unfamiliar, Yasso 800's is a workout where you do 10x800m, with an active recovery equal to the time of each repeat. Whats so great about this? For a lot of runners, it proves as an accurate predictor of marathon performance. The idea is, if you can run each 800m repeat in 3 minutes and 15 seconds, you're in shape to run a marathon in 3 hours and 15 minutes.

If you Google it, you'll find a lot of controversy around it because it only works for some runners. I wanted to find out if I'm one of them or not, so I ran it. Whats the worst that could happen? I get a good workout in? I think I'm okay with that risk.

So, what did my friend Yasso tell me? He told me I'm ready to go. Here are my 800m splits:

2:54
2:49
2:44
2:45
2:49
2:49
2:51
2:49
2:50
2:46

average: 2:48.6

And here is the MotionBased goodness: http://trail.motionbased.com/trail/activity/3869023

So, does this mean I'm in shape for a 2:48 marathon? Maybe. Either way, it was one of my best workouts in a while and shows me I'm in a lot better shape than I thought I was! Now I just need to recover in time for my long run on Saturday morning.

Happy running!

-Doug

3 comments:

nwgdc said...

Nice work, Doug! It's been a lot of fun keeping up on your training, as I'm running a parallel course of training: I'm hoping to run 3:10 in Chicago to BQ. Things had been going great until about 2 weeks ago, when my right plantar fascia started acting up. I'm still training, just cutting back on the running a bit and getting my HR up in other ways. I think I may try a Yasso this weekend or next week, as I've also heard great things about it. Again, great job, and keep it up!

Anonymous said...

My experience has been Yasso's work when the build up is gradual, the target pace is realistic, and the recovery between 800s is adequate. Otherwise, they can break us down and mislead us about our capabilities.

Your workout was very strong. Nice quality!

Arcane said...

Nice job. Mcmillan says that Yasso's tend to overpredict by about 5 minutes. I think they are used as a marathon predictor and shouldn't be used continuously, cause otherwise you end up training yourself to run 800's which can be misleading as a marathon predictor.