Vo2Max and Marathon Predictions

on Tuesday, August 28, 2007 at 10:09 PM

Did 7.3 miles this morning including 5x600m intervals. I've been reading up at McMillan's on his marathon prediction workouts. He suggest three different ways to try and predict a marathon time. He recommends:

  1. Fast finish long run with last 10 miles at marathon pace.
  2. Long distance race of between 15k and half marathon distance
  3. Yasso 800's

I did the fast finish long run this past weekend and a 15 k race the previous weekend and to top it off I'll be doing a Yasso 800 workout in lieu of the tune-up race that Pftiz has scheduled for this weekend. McMillan states that Yasso 800's over predict marathon times by about 5 minutes so if I want to run a 3:10 marathon, I should be able to do a 3:05 Yasso workout. That translates into a 6:12 min/mile pace. Not being too familiar with that pace, I thought I'd take the opportunity today to see if I maintain that pace for these 600m intervals.

Lap Time Pace
02:18.1 06:10.4
02:18.2 06:10.7
02:18.3 06:11.0
02:20.1 06:15.8
02:17.6 06:09.1

So I like that it didn't really slow down through each of the interval and was able to speed up towards the end. I've been targeting these VO2Max workouts at 6:25 to 6:30 pace so this was little outside my comfort zone. It was really tiring after each interval and I only had 90s jog recoveries so I think it would be possible to push this pace an extra 200m to complete the Yasso interval, but at the same time gain the extra 90s of recovery time to 3:05 recoveries. The prospect of doing 10 of them is a bit daunting though.

I noticed something interesting today. I was browsing the marathon website and realized that it actually cost me more to register for this Canadian marathon paying in Cdn funds then it would have if I registered in US funds. Even with the exchange rate and the 2.5% conversion fee that my credit card charges, I would have saved $5 by registering in US funds. The CDN dollar sure has risen a lot these past few months.

1 comments:

L*I*S*A said...

I'm going to give the Yasso 800's a try here soon, too. I hope they are accurate in predicting my sub 5-hr. marathon time.

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