New running strategy

I had a great run this sunday, I started at 7:30 in the morning and did 32 km at an average pace of 5 min 13 seconds. But I found a very interesting thing about myself and my running strategy... I ran almost 20 km at an average pace of less than 5 min and I was not that tired even after doing that and the rest of the 12 km I was all over the place on pace depending on the terrain, if it was hilly I slowed down and if it was down hill I sped up net-net I only lost 13 seconds in my overall pace... what was even more interesting is that my average pace was 5:08 until the 29 km, I lost another 5 seconds per km in the last 3 kms.

New Strategy

Well, I think if I run as hard as I can in the first leg of the race and cover as much distance as I can then I can actually afford to slow down in the latter half and it does not affect my overall time that much. I am going to work on my speed and improve my fast pace say to around 4 min a km, I have a way to measure this during the Yasso Speed work, I am doing about 3:15 for 800m... I need to pick that up to 3:00

My first Yasso 800 track work

I followed up on the plan and did my first Yasso 800 speed work this afternoon and here is the result:

As can be seen I did 800 meters in

3 min 15 sec

3 min 12 sec

3 min 18 sec

which tells me if I can continue on this form and run the 800 meters in similar time when I repeat the Yasso runs with 5 laps and 10 laps, I should look for a finish time of 3 hours and 15 min for the marathon!

If I can accomplish that I can qualify for the Boston Marathon! Lets see how my training progresses... lots of "Ifs" :)