This morning I ran up to Olympus High School in order to attempt my first Yasso 800 workout. It sounds like I’m way behind in discovering this workout; however, if you are also new to the Yasso 800s, the following is the background:
I just read Bart Yasso’s (Runner’s World Chief Running Officer) book entitled My Life on the Run last week and there is a chapter on the Yasso 800s in which Runner’s World published an article on in the mid-1990s. In short, when preparing to run a marathon, Yasso would run track intervals that consisted of a fast 800 followed by a 400 jog. He would do ten of these intervals then calculate the average of the fast 800s. Then Yasso realized that the times of 14 out of his last 15 marathons equaled to the exact minute this average 800 minutes-and-seconds pace interpreted as hours-and-minutes. For example, if Yasso ran an average 800 pace of 2:47 in his pre-marathon interval workout, he would run a 2:47 marathon. After being impressed by the strong correlation and the simplicity of the prediction, Amby Burfoot (1968 Boston Marathon Champion) made the Yasso 800s famous by publishing an article on them and many runners have since been able to accurately project their total marathon time off of this workout. Consequently, I figured to give this workout a try; that is, not so much for the marathon time projection, but because it sounds like a heck of an interval workout.
The Results: at the OHS track I completed the Yasso 800s with the following times: 2:42, 2:46, 2:45, 2:47, 2:54, 2:52, 2:49, 2:51, 2:51, 2:49. Trust me, those middle 800s are absolutely brutal; that is, when I finished the fourth interval and realized I still had six more to go, the lazy part of my mind was telling me that maybe I should just take it easy. In addition, no matter how slow you jog the preceding 400 (my average on the slow laps equates to 2:46 with a range from 2:19 to 3:25), I just tried to grind out those final 800s regardless of the time (i.e., I just wanted it to end). For what it is worth, my fast 800s calculate to an average pace of 2:48.
I ran back home to complete my running workout, which covered a total of 13.3 miles.
My running workout was relatively short and sweet in that I only did 200 sit-ups and 25 push-ups. | 