Last night I attended the track workout for the first time in a while. We appear to have re-started the Yasso 800 workout again. Last night it was seven of them. Over the next few months on the corresponding Wednesday we will do the same workout, but the number of reps will increase by one.
I ran with Gareth and Colin and Gareth's new protoge in the park beforehand for about 6 km. Stuart and Satohi and Jay also joined us at different times.
The 800s workout went pretty well. The idea of the Yasso 800s is to run the 800 m in a minutes and seconds time corresponding to your predicted hours and minutes time of a full marathon. If you think you can run a 3-hour marathon, you run your 800s in 3 minutes. We formed into like-paced groups and I went with the 3-hour group (easy maths!). The 800s were all within a second or two of 3:00, and one I even clicked at 0:03:00.0.
I'd been noticing my heart rate get to 96, 97, 98% on the second lap of some of the repeats even though my breathing was not getting too crazy. I know the monitor was working reliably, so I felt it was a bit unusual, in fact I wondered if my real HRmax might have been higher than it was set at. So I decided to do the last 800 as a normal first lap (everyone else was pushing hard) and then run the second lap at an increasing intensity through to a very hard last 100 sprint. Sure enough, this got the heart rate up to 103% of maximum, from which it would not budge. In other words, an upward revision of my maximum heart rate. And what would seem to be a pretty accurate measurement. Bugger! So it has gone from 184 to 186. That means I have been bludging by a heart beat or two per minute at all my percentages of maximum! The "bugger!" is not regret of inadequate past effort, but the thought that it is going to be harder from now on.
I had also been thinking that Satohi seemed too comfortable at her higher percentages of HRmax, but I was sure we had set her maximum correctly. Later on at drinks I asked to check her watch, and sure enough it was set at 187 instead of the 192 that we established for her a few weeks ago. Egad!! I corrected it. She is probably going to wonder why 80% suddenly feels like pretty hard work!
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About Me
- Stephen Lacey
- Born in 1963 under a camphor laurel tree beside Bilambil Creek, I now live in Tokyo with my Japanese wife and three sons. I started running in 2002 and my addictive personality soon clasped this foolish pastime to its bosom. I am also an enthusiastic amateur brewer and have won a few competitive home brewing awards in my time. Diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma in 2015, today I can no longer run, and my blog posts are more likely to concern the waxing and waning of my condition.
3 comments:
I'm hoping the reverse is true - I've taken the "under promise, over deliver" approach of inflating my max heart rate.....
LOL I will have a crack at establishing it accurately over the weekend.
Yasso 800's sound like a hard workout - well done ;-)
Man, you don't mess around getting into the Yassos doing 7 of them in the first session. It took me weeks to build up to 7 when I did them.
So when exactly is your next marathon?
Good question. About the next marathon, I mean. I have no idea. Probably not until autumn. Which is a bit of a bugger because I would have liked to have done one this spring, but the niggles, always the niggles.
But the "n x 800" is a pretty good 10k or half workout as well. And I didn't choose to do it, it was just what was on the menu. I'd been thinking more along the lines of 12 x 400s ;-)
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