Week 1: Yasso 800's

For the past 10 weeks or so my friend and I have been talking about running Yasso 800's in preparation for the Marine Corps Marathon in October. What are Yasso 800's exactly? According to this Runner's World article you start with 4 800's with the same amount of jog time between each repeat and each week and an additional 800 repeat until you have hit 10. In an ideal and perfect world you hit your time goal for each 800. Now, according to Bart Yasso, the time you run your 800 in should be used as a predictor for your marathon finish time. If you want to a 4 hour marathon, you should run 4:00 minute 800 repeats. Easy enough?

So last Thursday I was at the track at 5:50 AM. Also, at the track that early? Two other guys also doing some sort of speed workout and eventually we were joined by a local college softball team and a men's soccer team. (Side note, there was one girl on the softball team who was clearly the slowest one on the team. It was really encouraging to watch and listen to her teammates cheer her on and motivate her while they ran WITH her. GO KATIE GO! Sometimes I miss team sports. ) My friend and I started the warm up with a 2 mile progressively faster warm up. My friend is faster than me and I encouraged her to run faster when she felt she needed to. After the warm up we did some dynamic stretching (which I hate), but know is good for me- lunges, high knees, but kicks, etc. And then it was time to start the actual workout.

Over the past month I have gained a little bit of my confidence and fitness back and feel like I am ready to set a goal for Marine Corps: run as close to a 4 hour marathon as possible. Following Yasso logic that means I need to run my 800's at 4:00 minutes. My friend wants to run around a 3 hour 35 minute marathon so her goal was to run 3:35 minute 800's. My first 800 was about 3:43. Definitely need to slow it down a bit.  The next 3 were between 3:43 and 3:53. I am fully aware that this workout will get progressively harder each week so I need to work at getting my time as close to 4 minutes as possible. After the workout was finished, it was a 1 mile cool down for a total of about 6 miles.

I am trying to decide if I want to bring my ipod this week.

Super thankful to have such a nice track to run at and an accountability partner to meet me at the track.