Bart Yasso

And with that, welcome back to the Kinda Fast Podcast.

Today, we're gonna kick things off with, What Does That Even Mean? Like we always do, and today's word is Yasso 800s.

And then we're gonna talk about Clayton Young.

We've talked about him quite often here on the show.

I actually sat down with Keith Storm before I met him in real life, and we both went and raced a 5K this past weekend, and he got third male overall.

So not only is he a record holder for running all the roads, he's also kinda fast.

But before we get into that, let's dig into, What Does That Even Mean? Yasso 800s.

So Yasso 800s are a popular mani- marathon training workout named after the longtime runner and Runner's World figure, Bart Yasso.

If you run for three minutes at your all-out 10-minute race pace, then you have to take three minutes recovery.

Now, There's one thing that I want to address here is I will assign 800-meter repeats, and there is something floating out there into the world called Yasso 800s.

It's something that's funny because I had coached for 20 years, and I'd never heard of it.

And then when I got into the marathon coaching space, people started telling me about this thing called Yasso 800s.

And I thought to myself, is that like Yasso? yo-yo 800s where you go really fast in one and slow in the other because you're yo-yoing and they're like, no, no, not yo-yo.

And I said, so, okay, well, what is that? I went and I looked it up.

Basically what it is is it's doing 800s on a one-to-one recovery, okay? And if you could do, like, say 10 of them, then allegedly that means you're supposed to be able to run a marathon at that pace.

I take massive issue with that because if you run 10 Yasso 800s, so let's say you go and you run 10 times an 800 in 3 minutes and 10 seconds with a 3-minute and 10-second recovery, that doesn't mean you can run 3 hours and 10 minutes of marathon.

The best guys have bad days.

What, what people often do, you know, they wanna build that confidence coming to marathon, is this thing, they often call it, like, Yasso 800s.

Yeah, yeah.

Which is, like, often this weird kind of workout which has this bizarre correlation.

Uh, I think it's just because it is easy.

A lot of people say to me, "Oh, Rob, I'm a runner, but not like you." And I'm like, "Why? Where, in what way? Like, do you not, like, sort of go like that?" You know, and, um, you know, Bart Yasso said, "There's no fast runners, no slow runners, only runners," and that applies for long distance, short distance.

And so if you ever get snobbery directed towards you, ignore it.

If you ever think about snobbery towards someone else, keep it internal.

I had Meb Kofleski, who has won the New York Marathon, the Boston Marathon, and an Olympic medal.

And they kind of kicked us off in our first year, along with Bart Yasso, who's local.

Everybody knew him from Runner's World.

I got to do his

but

yeah so it was just bad and I don't really have much to say other than it was bad I was not confident leaving it I felt really like okay Megan you're just gonna run like four and a half hour marathon it's fine that's what you're gonna do you're just gonna do that but I kind of had a day to be depressed about it and I still hate that run but I then had a good workout today so I did the Yasso 800s again which I talked about in the last episode how that went and it went well so I'm just praying for good weather now because I think that's going to be like make or break it for me is these conditions okay so

your do you recall what the conditions were like for your previous 20 miler run for your training block last time? Sorry, I probably should have asked this in the group message.

No, but I should look back.

Like from the beginning or like, you know, previous to like before you got out there, like, were you like, yes, I've got this.

I know I can do this just based on how training had been up to that point.

It's, it's, hard for me to answer that which it shouldn't be like I was feeling I guess so when I did my Yasso my first round of Yasso 800s that's what they call like a predictor workout and per the I hit all my reps at four minutes or faster so I that predicts a four hour marathon so like based on like what that workout going into the long run had like I was feeling pretty confident but also I have been struggling to hit those paces in this weather.

So it's like, I guess I don't know that my lack of confidence is necessarily coming from like, it's rooted in fitness.

I had Meb Kofleski, who has won the New York Marathon, the Boston Marathon, and an Olympic medal.

And they kind of kicked us off in our first year, along with Bart Yasso, who's local.

Everybody knew him from Runner's World.

I got to do his