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Yosso 800s, sort of

March 20, 2019 (Morning)

Exercise Type: Run

Comments:
I ran over the to Sarajevo's one track, located on the far side of town out by the airport. This was somewhat convenient actually because I was planning to rent a car later in the evening at the airport, so the run allowed me to get there without having to pay for a cab or spent an hour on the tram or trolleybus. It took me 6 miles to even reach the track, going at one might call an irritatingly-slow pace, which should have been a wake-up call that yesterday's not-quite-tempo and Sunday's half-marathon had taken their toll on my legs. When I finally got to the track I discovered it was closed, possibly because it was raining though I'm not entirely sure why. The guard suggested I do my workout around the park in which it was located, so I went ahead and measured out an 800m circuit along the path that's marked for the little imitation choo-choo-train in summer. Turns out that loop is just barely over 800m; my designated finish line lay only a couple seconds behind the point where I'd started.

The idea behind the Yasso 800 workout is to run 6-10 800s at a challenging pace with 400m recoveries in between - enough time to fully catch your breath without being overly generous. The pace is simply marathon goal time (in my case, 2 hours and 49 minutes) converted to minutes and seconds (that is, 2 minutes and 49 seconds). Usually, when I run this workout I start off going my goal pace or slightly slower but then speed up as the workout goes - inadvertently first, then intentionally as I become spurred on by my own success. In past marathon training periods I've been aiming to break my PR of 2:40, so I'm used to logging times in that ballpark, decreasing to the mid-to-low 2:30s as the workout progresses.

I'm writing this a week later so I don't remember what exactly my initial time was but I think it was in the mid 2:40s. The next couple got a bit slower, and I found myself getting discouraged. Not that I'd been feeling particularly spritely to begin with. Around #4 I looked at my watch and saw I really needed to get over the car rental place before it closed so I abandoned the circuit I'd measured out and ran my last two pickups on the sidewalk heading towards the airport, running hard for about 2:55 each time which I figured was more or less an 800 at the pace I'd been going. In the end I'm not thrilled with the workout, but glad I got the work done, so to speak.