Evening folks. Well the time has passed at warp speed as usual, and the Ticino half marathon is now only 3 days away. The training has been going very well, and the only real deviation from the plan that Jeff set me was when I missed a few consecutive days of training (well 6 or so) due to a cold (aka man flu). In general though, I have followed 90% of his plan.
Some of the target times Jeff sets for me seem a little ambitious, but I always try my best to hit them. For instance the other week I was meant to do 8 Yasso 800s, in a target time of 2 minutes 51 to 2 minutes 53 per 800m. Now I can easily do one or two 800m intervals in that kind of time, but I don't think I could do 8 of them. Or maybe I could, but on that particular day I was suffering from shin splints before I had even started, so there was no chance. In the end I did the first and last intervals in the target time, but the ones in between were closer to 3 minutes. I was pacing myself.
In order to be in with a chance of a sub 3 hour marathon, Bart Yasso says that you should be able to do 10 x 800m intervals in 3 minutes each, with 3 minutes rest between intervals. So taking only this into consideration, it looks like I am on course to be sub 3. I would only have to be able to do 2 additional intervals at the same kind of pace that I was doing the other day, and I reckon I could do that even now. Jeff gave me 2 minutes rest in between each interval, but Bart Yasso allows an extra full minute of recovery. The workout I was doing was therefore tougher than a standard Yasso 800s workout.
Looking good so far, but the Yasso 800s progress doesn't seem to match with the marathon predictions based upon time trials I have been doing over shorter distances, such as 10k and 16k. They seem to give me a predicted marathon time of 3 hours 15 to 3 hours 20. This means, that to be honest I am not really sure what I am capable of. Somewhere between 3 hours and 3 hours 20 it would seem, which is a very wide range indeed.
The half marathon in Ticino this Sunday will be a good chance to get a more accurate idea of what I am capable of in the Pisa marathon. I will run it as a full on race. My previous half marathon PB is around 1 hour 35, so I would hope to be able to go under 1 hour 30 with all this quality training under my belt. I have never trained this much, or this consistently in my life before, except in the 3 months leading up to the Marathon des Sables.
