The Yasso 800 workout was named after an editor of the popular magazine Runner's World, Bart Yasso.
It has received tons of attention from runners in recent years.
It is essentially a marathon training workout where you work on building up your 800 metre repeats every week.
You start at about four repeats a week and try to build up to at least ten repeats.
Your ultimate goal is to run your 800 metre repeats at a steady pace. From the time that it takes you to run your 800 metre repeats (in minutes) you should be able to predict how fast you will be able to run your marathon (in hours).
Yasso 800 Rule
Let's consider an example. Pretend you do your Yasso 800 repeats at 3:30 minutes per 800 metres. In between that you recover with a light jog for the same length of time. The Yasso 800 Rule says that because you can do your 800 metre repeats in 3:30 mins your marathon time is going to be 3:30 hours.
So, the lower your minutes for each 800 metre run the lower your predicted marathon time will be in hours.
Yasso 800 - Too Good to be True?
If that sounds too good to be true, you are onto something. In most cases it is too good to be true for very good reasoning. That said, there are ways you can use Yasso 800s to your advantage once you learn how to do approach things realistically.
In my opinion, Yasso 800s are ineffective when predicting marathon times. The flaw in the logic is simply that we are comparing a distance run over 800 metres with a distance run over 26.2 miles. That's about 53 x 800 metres. Any comparison between the two is going to be a stretch.
10k races and half marathon racing times can be a reasonable predictor of marathon performance. Even then, the marathon is in a league of its own. If your training has not been sufficient, then your race time will fall short of the time predicted by Race Conversion Calculators.
So, if a half marathon can not always be indicative of your marathon performance, how can 800 metres be?
Marathon training is very different from training for shorter races. It requires an adequate aerobic running base while an 800 metre run is mainly anaerobic. Therefore, how do you expect an anaerobic training run to predict your time in a largely aerobic race?
Many runners have found that their marathon race time fell short of what their Yasso 800s predicted by about 10-15 minutes.
The Yasso 800 is a nice, simple concept and when it gets pushed by a magazine that gets read by hundreds of thousands of runners world wide it will become popular. However, as a marathon running training workout it falls short of the mark.
Let's see however how we can derive some value from this workout after all.
Value of the Yasso 800
So, to predict marathon race times it is not the best tool available to us. But from personal experience I have found it to be quite a good gauge for half marathon race performance.
For this you need to do the following:
Suppose you can run your Yasso 800s in 3:18 mins.
Go to the Race Conversion Calculator mentioned before and fill in 3 hrs 18 mins as the time you ran for the marathon and ask for your predicted half marathon performance.
The answer is 1 hr 35 mins, indicating that this will be your half marathon time.
This at least gives you a way to use the Yasso 800s.
Yasso 800 - An Effective Workout?
The Yasso 800 is a rather effective running workout. However, there is better interval training you can do when preparing for a marathon. Studies have proven that the best length of your intervals is about five minutes.
For many of us that would get us beyond 800 metres. 1k repeats, 1200s and mile repeats with less recovery time in between are generally seen to be way more useful than Yasso 800s.
In the end, you have to do what works for you.
I find myself often dedicating one or two training sessions in a cycle to Yasso 800s just to get a feel for what my form is like.
With the difficulties of measuring out exact distances I usually just do time based intervals.
You can use Yasso 800s for your own interval training.
But be careful when using Yasso 800 to predict a marathon performance time.
Also, because of the disconnect between the 800 metre and the marathon, it is not advisable to dedicate too much of your running training to these intervals.
Want more running gear advice?
Simply subscribe to my newsletter or to my site blog and you are ensured of keeping up-to-date with all the Best Running Gear!
