ODM week 2

Q1 - 10 min easy + 3 x (5 min hard + 5 min easy)
Q2 - same
Q3 - 12mi LSD
total mi: 35

ODM week 1

Fighting a cold last week. One quality day, three days off, terrible mileage.
Q1 - 10mi LSD
total mi: 27

maintenance 10/4/14

8mi easy

progression 2/1/14

4mi with the club / 8:15
6mi easy / 7:15
4mi @ TMP / 6:30

Man am I ready for some track workouts. Fish gotta swim, you know what I'm saying?

quality 1/18/14

11mi easy + 5K MP workout / 20:04

quality 1/16/14

42 min fartlek / 15 min easy + 27 min alternating

I did not just skip six weeks of training. Honest. But work did get crazy which meant lots of easy miles and little quality. I did a hard fartlek on 12/14 and 14mi LSD on 1/11; everything in between was 4-8 maintenance stuff.

quality 12/5/13

5.6K tempo / 21:00

I can never decide between the NHS and WHS tracks. The surfaces are similar. NHS has shorter curves, which I like. WHS has better wind protection. NHS generally has fewer people using the track, which is good, but the WHS walkers use outside lanes more consistently. So NHS is my choice if it is a calm day and nobody else is out, but that rarely happens.

quality 11/28/13

12mi LSD / 1:28:40

yasso 800s 11/12/13

Most LDR geeks have heard of Yasso 800s. The idea, credited to RW's Bart Yasso, is that you can confirm/predict your ability to run a specific marathon time by converting marathon hours to minutes, marathon minutes to seconds, and then doing 10x800 at that pace. So someone aiming for a 3:10 marathon should do 10x800 @ 3:10. The appropriate rest interval is kind of a gray area; I think the original article said it should equal the time of the workbout interval but I've also heard that it should just be a 400 jog.

At any rate, there has been lots of debate over the past dozen years about this workout. The negative criticism is usually: 1) it is not actually a good marathon predictor, and/or 2) it is not a good marathon prep workout.

My response to criticism #1 is: It depends. I don't think I'm one of them, but there are probably plenty of runners out there with a physiology that reflects this marathon/800 relationship. Bart Yasso, for example. As for criticism #2, I mean... please. I don't think 10x800 is the best idea for a VO2max workout but it is still a VO2max workout and, unless you are at 100% of your VO2max plateau (I'm not), VO2max workouts help.

But I don't really care about any of that. I just like them, which is probably the best reason to do any running workout. Seeing as how this was still 27 weeks out from my next marathon -- assuming I do Sugarloaf, that is -- I decided to stop at five. Yasso did explicitly say that the full 10x800 should only be attempted towards the end of marathon prep. I also decided to subtract six minutes from my 2:50 target because I think I have a higher proportion of fast-twitch fibers than the typical marathoner. 2:44 then, with equal rest. My times were:

2:44.2 - 2:45.4 - 2:43.3 - 2:43.4 - 2:43.2  (avg 2:43.9)

Not bad, except for #2. The weather was typical New England: Cold, wet, windy, some snow. Fantastic.

quality 11/9/13

Did a 15.5mi trail LSD session all through the Blue Hills Reservation with four representatives from the local ultra crowd. Definitely not the type of LSD that I am used to, but wow... the 7:45 AM view from the top of Buck Hill was glorious. And I only fell down once -- within sight of my car, of course.