Calm Down

The title of this blog comes from Coach BB. Her version was a little saltier and she kept yelling it at me as we were running our first set of 800s on Wednesday. We're trying out Yasso 800s as part of my marathon training plan and this was the first session so I *only* had to do 4 of them.

Coach BB has a straightaway near her house that is 400 meters long so we ran it out and back. Fun times!  The most surprising thing was that there was a Brazilian woman out running 300 meter repeats by herself on the same stretch. I've never seen anyone running repeats here so I was very impressed. Unfortunately my limited Portuguese didn't allow me to tell her to rock on so I just gave her a very meaningful head bob.

Bart Yasso himself explains Yasso 800s

The idea behind these Yasso 800s is that you take the time you want to finish the marathon in, say 3 hours and 35 minutes and you change it to 3 minutes and 35 seconds. That's how fast you'll run each 800 meters. Each session you add one more and when you get up to ten of them, you're 100% guaranteed to run a marathon in that time. Hahaha! I wish. No such guarantees from Mr. Yasso.

So here goes, I'm putting it out there. I'm running each 800 in 3:35.

My goal time for the Maraton do Rio is 3:35:00. And I'm saying it: Boston Qualifier. Gulp.

I'd like to qualify for Boston again before I turn 40 and move up to the Master's category. For my age (39) on Boston Marathon race day 2014, I need to run faster than 3:40 but...with the new system of faster people getting into the race first, I really need to run faster than 3:38. So I'm putting it out there, I'm going to try do that in Rio.


In order to run a marathon that fast, I need to practice running faster. Duh! But I've never really worked on that during marathon training before, I've only been concerned with building the miles up. So my training plan for Rio has speedwork, hills and tempo runs (alternating every third week) and every week on Fridays I'll do a run at race pace (about 8:15 per mile). I'm also supposed to be doing Fast Finishes for most of my long runs, picking up the pace in the last few miles so that I cruise to the finish.

Demonstrating fast finish for Eleanor 

So far I've done two runs at race pace. The first was a four mile run that I started and finished from the top of my hill so the first mile was really fast and the last mile was really slow. I can see my mile splits after I finish on my Garmin watch and at no point was I even close to the pace, I was always either much faster or much slower. After talking with Coach BB I tried something a little different today for the five mile run-I used the hill for a warmup and cooldown and did the run at race pace only on the flatter road. I also didn't look at my watch at all during the run. That all seemed to help and my splits were less crazy and closer to the goal pace.

So I'm working on settling into a steady pace on my runs. I also need to work on my breathing which tends to be panicked. Coach BB is trying to get me to calm my breathing without slowing my pace and that is a new concept for me.

So I'm trying a new mantra: calm breath fast feet calm breath fast feet calm breath fast feet  

Eleanor and I after our run together this week