Vo2Max and Marathon Predictions

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.