Day 223

• 5.78 miles
• 7:49/mile pace
• 0625
• From/To home
• I decided that I'd do some sort of "work out" type run two times a week, plus one long run a week, leading up to June 1 when I begin to start an actual training plan geared towards an early December marathon (the sight for the marathon seems to be changing, but since it's still a long time until then I'm not worried about it yet).   Well, I decided maybe Tuesday and Thursday would be good days to do these sort of "work out" runs and then I'd be able to choose which weekend day I could do a longish run based on whatever else is going on.   This all sounded logical and maybe even easy when I was thinking about it on Sunday afternoon and Monday...then Tuesday (today) arrived and it wasn't easy to even think about anymore.   I seriously considered just doing another cruise run and going hard tomorrow, but then decided I wanted to get it over with...but what to do?   How 'bout Yasso 800's?  OK, those sound cool and maybe they'll give me confidence in my potential for speed which I have been lacking.   So, what are Yasso 800's?   Good question, I'm not 100% sure, but I thought they were 800's (or half a mile) at a pace in minutes and seconds that looks like the pace in hour and minutes that one would want to run a marathon in.   In example:   Run sets of 800 meters in 3:10 (three minutes and 10 seconds) each to help prepare to eventually run a 3:10 marathon (three hours and 10 minutes).   Some super accomplished well respected runner by the name of Bart Yasso, who writes for and maybe founded Runners World magazine, or something like that, came up with this idea and many in the running community seem to buy into it.   I decided I'd give it a try and ideally be able to run a few of them at the pace I wanted (3 minutes each or faster), which would possibly make me believe that running a sub-3 hour marathon may actually be something that I could accomplish by early December 2012.   Anyway, this is what I think Yasso 800's are, if they're something different then I guess I'll learn that some other time.   Only question remaining was how much rest I should take between the 800's...I was thinking around 15-20 minutes, but since everyone in our house was awake by 5:30 this morning I was able to ask Becca, which mistakenly I did.   She said "I think we used to do 1 lap recovery," which means I'd only get to recover for .25...which is somewhat hard to stretch to 15 minutes, without stopping.   So I started...after warming up for 10 minutes...and after a false start of around .15 or .2 where I ran hard only to realize I had not hit the lap start button, so I had to start over...which I did after another minute or so of recovery/warm-up....anyway, here are the results of my first effort at such a training effort -- oh, I decided I'd do four of them, just because I thought that was about as many as I'd be able to do before fatigue made it too difficult to meet the time goal for each:
• First 800/half mile:       3:00.76
• Recovery period:           2:27
• Second 800/half mile:   2:56.6
• Recovery period:           2:27
• Third 800/half mile:      3:04.13
• Recovery period:           2:29
• Fourth 800/half mile:      3:09.21
• Recovery period:           2:25
• Confidence completely shattered, what a stupid idea...only question now is whether doing this work out now was dumber than setting a goal of breaking 3 hours in a marathon later, or about the same.   I was sure on that last one that I had veered off course and finished in knee deep Pacific Ocean waves, but then I regained focus and realized I was still in the paved desert.   I think I'll be OK doing a slow run tomorrow, but it will be interesting to see if I'm up for speeding up a bit again on Thursday....I've committed to a lot of mileage with IronChad on Sunday, so I guess I won't quit completely, not yet anyway.