yasso 800s

yesterday, i decided to hit up the track for some speed training, so i went out to bethesda chevy chase high school out in maryland to use their track. i decided to try this technique that my coach had told us about called the yasso 800s. basically, this guy yasso, who works at runner's world, made up this technique of predicting your marathon time by running 800 meters. what you do is run 800 meters (2 laps around the track) and the time it takes you to to run the 800 meters (in minutes) is what your time will be (in hours) when running the marathon. so yesterday, i started out by running 800 meters fast and then after that 800 meters, i jogged for the same number of minutes it took me to run the previous 800 meters. basically you do 2 laps around the track fast and then a couple minutes slow to recover.

what yasso does is start running yasso 800s a couple of months before his goal marathon. the first week he does four. on each subsequent week, he adds one more until he reaches 10. since yesterday was my first time at doing this, i did 5 repeats. and if this method is correct, i should be running my marathon in 3 hours and 57 minutes. hmm... not sure this is really feasible, seeing as how that's a 9 minute and 3 second pace! and for me, that's fast!

well, i'm running the new york city half marathon this weekend, so i'll see how that race goes!

another plus of running around the track yesterday was that i got to calibrate my ipod. since calibration, i haven't run with it yet, so i'm still not sure whether the calibration worked. but i'm keeping my fingers crossed.

some people have asked me what the heck the ipod+nike device is and how it works, so i've pasted a picture of it here. basically, inside the box, on the left hand side, that oval shaped thing with the apple and nike symbol is the signal. you put this thing either inside your shoe or on your shoe. then, the white thing on the right hand side is what you attach to your ipod. basically the oval thing sends signals to the white thing to tell it how much you have run. then your ipod talks to you -- on the screen of the ipod it tells you the time elapsed, how much distance you have covered, and how many calories you have burned. pretty cool huh?

for some reason, in my previous blog entry, i couldn't get the photo of my friends and i at the arboretum to paste into the blog. so i've put the picture in here.


okay, i'm off. until the new york city half marathon...