yasso 800s

in my ongoing training and desire to know how i am doing i came across an interesting training session for the marathon. accredited to burt yasso, the idea is that by running 10 repetitions of 800m you can estimate your marathon time. how does it work? well, relatively easily. you run your 10 reps and at the end you take the average 800m time in minutes and seconds and that will be your marathon time, in hours and minutes.

here were my results from today's session:
rep 1: 2m 57s
rep 2: 2m 51s
rep 3: 2m 53s
rep 4: 2m 50s
rep 5: 2m 56s
rep 6: 2m 55s
rep 7: 2m 52s
rep 8: 2m 52s
rep 9: 2m 49s
rep 10: 2m 46s
average time: 2minutes 52seconds ----- 5mins 47s /mile pace

as a recovery i jogged 200m in between each rep. my average recovery time was around 70 seconds. after i finished the session i read some more about this workout and found out that you should actually take the same recovery as your 800m rep time, so i clearly wasn't taking enough recovery. despite that it felt like a good session and is something i will do again (perhaps with more recovery this time).

i also read that some people seem to think that this works as a predictor but it predicts about 5 minutes too fast for the marathon time. as my rep average was around 2minutes 52seconds, that would point towards a 2 hour 57 minutes marathon time. fine by me!!!

clearly this predictor workout comes with plenty of warnings attached. you still need to do the necessary mileage training for a marathon, for example. completing ten 800m reps is obviously not the same as running over 42km! however, it was an interesting workout and made me feel pretty good! i think i can run it more effectively next time having done it once.