My quest for sub 1:50 in the 800m

Week Ending in 3/16/19

Sunday 800m pace workout. 100m, 200m, 300m, 400m, 300m, 200m, 100m. Rests were 3, 4.5, 6, 4.5, 3 minutes respectively. 14.1, 28.1, 43.3, 58.4, 42.6, 31(lol), 13.6

+ evening shakeout 3 miler @ 7:40 pace

Monday 5 miles easy @ 7:30 pace + Lifting

Tuesday 7.4 miles easy @ 7:25 pace

Wednesday Cut Down Workout.

3200m: 10:57

2x600m: 1:46, 1:45

4x400m: 65, 65, 65, 63

2x200m: 28.5, 27.5

5min rest after the 3200m to change shoes and stuff, then 2min rest for everything else.

Thursday 8 miles easy @ 7:30 pace (first shirtless run of the year!!)

Friday 5 miles easy @ 7:36 pace + Lifting

Saturday Light Progression / uptempo. 1 mile warmup, 6 mile progression starting at 6:40, cutting to 6:00 pace by mile 4, then holding pace until 6, 1 mile cool down.

Week total: 47 miles

All in all I'm really happy with this week. First real 800m pace workout of the year went well, albeit painfully. It had a lot of rest but I wanted to really focus on hitting splits and running as comfortably as possible with all that 'lactic' pain. Wednesday's workout was another good one. Working into faster tempos and more 3k-800m pace stuff that I haven't really touched yet. It was actually very dark at the track after the 3200m, so it was a different feeling running with very little light (no lights on at the track, just some distant parking lot lights. I never really had to dig at any point in the cut down so that's good. Saturdays run was just some light aerobic quality / maintenance work.

My first outdoor race and 800m in 2 years is in 6 days!

How was it?

3283823 wrote:

How was it?

+1

My post race prediction is 2:15.

Did some light stalking and found results

If I’m correct OP ran a 1:57 this past weekend.

Good run TAR, that’s a great run to pop the season off with.

Week ending in 3/23/19

Sunday 11.5 miles @ 7:14 pace. Started slow and was putting down smooth 6:40s the last few miles.

Monday 8 miles @ 7:26 pace + lifting

Tuesday Evening workout. 3x1k with 1min rest, then 600m, 400m, 300m, 200m with 3-3.5min rest. 3:31, 3:28, 3:27, 1:33, 61, 43.5, 27.5.

Wednesday Off

Thursday 6.5 miles @ 7:18 pace + 5x8s hill sprints after

Friday Pre Meet. 5 miles @ 7:30 pace + strides and dynamics.

Saturday Cal-U Early Bird Invite. 800m in 1:57.53 for 3rd place. + tempo 5k at 6:00 pace

Weekly Mileage Total: 44 miles

All in all this week was pretty lame. I did actually feel pretty good on the longer run on Sunday, but made sure not to press or anything. I was really out of it mentally on Tuesday's workout, so I was just glad to get the work in. It was pitch black out by the time I started the 400m, which didn't help things.

Meet recap: Sunny but pretty windy and chilly all day. Real feel was ~25 degrees when we got there and only peaked at about 40 all day. Warmed up and went into the race without many expectations. I figured it would be a close race, and with the wind I assumed it might go out slow.

They start us in lanes and we go out and I'm nearly in last off the turn, which is fine with me because the back stretch was the windy stretch. Came through 200m in 28 low and was surprised it was that fast at all. I passed some kids on the inside and we came through 400m in 57 high still pretty packed up. Our 400-500m felt really slow so I wanted to try to get out on the back stretch, but I noticed the pack was 5 wide beside me, and since it was the windy stretch I just stayed tucked in lane 1 because it would have taken way too much to go that far wide in the wind. We hit 600m in like 1:27 and shortly after that I found a hole and went into lane 2 and started going. I passed a few kids on the turn and came into the final 100m in 3rd place. I made up ground on 1 and 2 but didn't have enough time to catch them. 1st place was a half second up on me, and 2nd place was less than .1 ahead. Afterwards I ran with a buddy in the 5k for a light tempo effort at ~6:00 pace.

I'm surprised you ran 1:57 off that training, but missed that you'd previously run 1:52.

Based on your talent, sub 1;50 certainly appears to be feasible.

P.S. 1:52 is not average.

dunes runner wrote:

I'm surprised you ran 1:57 off that training, but missed that you'd previously run 1:52.

Based on your talent, sub 1;50 certainly appears to be feasible.

Thought your 2:15 prediction was trolling but now I'm not sure lol.

I'm obviously not in contention to run sub 1:50 this year, but I've been getting used to work life and battling injuries and what not. I was gung-ho when I made the thread, but I guess since the main goal with running for me is to get as fast as I can, sub 1:50 is a good 'reach-for-the-stars' goal.

And I was much more average when I made this handle and first started posting on letsrun. Heck, I couldn't even make my DIII colleges XC top 7 for three years, and we were the definition of an average DIII team. I also only ran ~5:00 and 10:46 in high school, despite nearly year round training (albeit not a crazy amount). So yeah, I'm well above the average human, but I was always around other runners on my past teams who would work way less than me and be naturally faster. And I did work very hard the entire year leading up to my 1:52, so who knows.

Week Ending in 3/30/19

Sunday Shakeout 2 miles slow. Tried to explore some trails but it was way too muddy.

Monday 7.3 miles @ 6:50 pace + Lifting

Tuesday 6x1k @ CV with 1min rest + 6x15s bike sprints with 45s rest. 3:29, 3:28, 3:26, 3:25, 3:24, 3:22

Wednesday 7.5 miles easy @ 7:28 pace

Thursday 8x150m @ 400m pace with 3min rest.

19.3, 18.9, 18.8, 18.7, 18.4, 18.9, 18.7, 17.8.

Friday 5 miles recovery @ 7:38 pace

Saturday 8 mile light progression run. First three miles started at 7:30 and cut down to 6:00 pace.

Weekly Mileage 42.3 miles

Not a bad week. Was hoping to run a little more Sunday but it didn't work out well. Not a huge deal, enough to get the blood flowing. Tuesday I just wanted to get some good aerobic work in. Weather was crap so I just did it on the treadmill, which is why I did bike sprints. Thursday's 150m reps went a lot better than I thought they would. I wasn't ever 100% flat out, just trying to stay controlled. I figured most of them would be high 19s, but I'm happy my 400m-ish speed is pretty decent. Saturday was just an aerobic maintenance day to keep some fitness while I shift into more 'anaerobic/lactic acid' (I know this technically isn't right) heavy training. Racing on the 6th and the 13th. Will probably be a little tired going into the race on the 6th, but hopefully it'll pay dividends for the 13th or later. Legs / foot is holding up. Felt a little beat up after the 150m reps but I'm surviving, probably because my mileage is abysmal.

Thanks for posting. Are you racing an 800 in each of those next two races?

Any thoughts on hopping into a 400/1500/5k, or doubling with one of those? We have somewhat similar track resumes... my personal experience is that it takes a few races to get up to performance level, and that doubling once or twice (I usually did this with a 4x4 or 4x8) expedites the process. Either way, best of luck to you!

I think this thread and your optimistic story is one of the few great things on LetsRun right now. I'm by no means at your level, but I wondered if, according to the traditionalists here, your easy pace work is either not easy enough or you don't do enough of it. What do you think? My personal belief is you will get to sub 1:50 at some point, mostly from your excellent attitude and work ethic, and as long as you're under 30.

I would say you should seriously consider doing your CV workouts about 10-20 seconds faster...right now you are running slower then lactate threshold, and CV is a little bit faster. If you don't hit above 90% of VO2max, you don't get the "magic" benefit of CV (there's a study you can find by Jan Helgerud et al that talks about this). That might be the key thing you're missing right now for your aerobic fitness (easy mileage is great but it doesn't actually do a whole lot to improve VO2max).

About ten days ago, I posted: 1) Your workouts are too slow for a future sub-1:50 800m runner; 2) Your mileage runs are too slow for a future sub-1:50 800m runner. My post was deleted. You are not going to slow jog your way to sub-1:50 800m. Getting my post deleted is not going to make you faster.

I think you're assuming he is currently as aerobically fit his 800m time says he is mile+ wise, but maybe he knows he's weaker aerobically and isn't straining on the CV work purposefully. I'm currently near 2:05 shape (not exactly 1:57 and dropping) and Tinman's calculator has me at 3:10 for 1000s @ CV, however, I run mine at an 3:35 because my mile time is 4:42, not the 4:30 equivalent his chart shows that a 2:05 is equal to.

He's just training within himself, which when talking about aerobic gains, is very smart.

Good job TAR, keep up the work!

Tinman's calculators are all bogus, and CV pace is his catch-phrase for 10k paced work. Essentially, interval workouts at 90-95% of VO2max (10k pace, CV, cruise interval, whatever you want to call them) result in a much greater improvement in VO2max than lactate threshold workouts (85-87% of VO2max). Tinman, I'm sure, read the same study that I did, and concluded (correctly) that 10k pace is a sort of "critical velocity" where past that point, your gains increase dramatically. So how does this work into TAV's training? When he does his 1k workouts, he runs at an effort that is lower than 90% of his VO2max...while VO2max is not as closely related to the 800 as it is to the 1500+, the fact is that a 1:57 guy is not running at 90% VO2max while hitting 3:29s. Training within yourself is fine - it's one of the reasons Tinman prefers 10k pace to 3k/5k pace, because it's less taxing on the legs but it still breaks that threshold of hugely increased aerobic gains. But right now, TAV is not getting the benefit of the workout, because he's running so slowly. Ideally, he would get his VO2max tested and calculate from there what 90% of his VO2max is (~95% of the pace of his VO2max, which is a whole other thing that people get confused), but without that he will just have to rely on some form of conversion. Tinman comes at it from a distance runner's perspective, so while he might convert 1:57 to 4:15 or so for the purposes of determining pace, TAV should not do so. Coming at it from an 800 runner's perspective, TAV is somewhere between 4:22 and 4:27 shape, and should do his CV 1ks no slower than 3:14, and no faster than 3:07. If he runs an actual mile, this will become easier to determine. For you, NWA, with a 4:42 mile, you should do yours at somewhere between 3:23 and 3:26.

That depends on what is the purpose of the session. I know that this is a beaten topic, however, I don't think that VO2max work should be done often and threshold work should be done more often instead. A well known example of that is what Ingebrigtsens are doing with their multiple up to 4 or 5 sessions of threshold work a week.

Now, for different type of athletes who might have identical results on the same distance threshold work pace might be quite a bit different. This was written quite extensively in one of the classic letsrun threads "2 kinds of runners. Which are you?" (

). Where difference between two Portuguese with very similar PRs but very much different training was compared. More of a ST Carlos Lopez could do some high end aerobic runs at threshold or so day in and day out, while more of a FT Fernando Mamede was more of an intervals guy and couldn't do the same training as Lopez (and vice versa). If we look at (

;) study, which is admittedly very small sample. Yet again, we have subjects with very similar VO2max but different thresholds (threshold expressed as % of VOmax). What is common among those with higher threshold and those with lower - the higher threshold athletes have higher percentage of type 1 fibers and the lower have higher percentage of type 2 fibers.

If you are more of a fast twitch athlete, then you should be rather on the cautious side when doing threshold type training because one can easily slip into rather more taxing territory. I think OP rather knows himself well, and paces on the side of a caution. At this stage he does not need to go fully into VO2max work. If he wants to reach sub 1:50, he has to think long term and get back a strong aerobic based from which to build and only then go for the sharpening work with both harder VO2max intervals at 3K/5K pace and lactic buffering stuff at 800/1500 pace.

I'll try to respond to everyone's posts here real quick. I'm currently procrastinating going out for a quick workout.

PCTfkt - Thanks for following along. The next two races will be 800m races. I'll likely be a little tired for this weekends race but next weekend should hopefully be pretty good. I'd love to do an 800m/400m double at these meets, but the 400m is directly before the 800m, so that makes it tough. The only events that are possible for me to do after the 800m (if I want to run a fresh 800m) is the 200m or the 5k. I'm signed up for the 200m also this weekend. Being able to do a 4x4 at the end of every meet is something I took for granted when I was in school.

100m - Thank you for the kind words. I don't think that my easy work is too fast at all. If anything, it is too slow for an 800m guy, but I will kind of address this in conjunction with another post below.

gahagand - I typically try to get my CV work down to 3:20/km by the end of the workout. The hardest part about training and using any kind of calculator is not knowing exactly what pace is correct for me on the day. I can assure you that, based on the 1 hour race pace rule of thumb, the 5:30-ish pace I'm running most of my CV work at is way faster than my lactate threshold. The fastest I've ever done a longer race is 5:39 pace for a 15k, and I doubt I could even hit that right now. I will usually use my estimated (or known, if Ive run one) 5k fitness when using those calculators, because I know I drop off pretty bad after the distances get longer than a mile. I've rarely raced a 5k when in top shape, but my PR is only 15:49, and I really doubt i'd break 16 right now. I'd need good weather and pacing on a track to do it at the moment. I've been playing around with the idea of doing my CV and Vo2 work at faster paces, but with shorter reps (and short rest), since I'm a little more on the fast twitch side. I struggle pretty bad with vo2 work and that along with my overall endurance is something I could work on a little more I think.

too slow, too slow - Not sure what post you're specifically talking about, but if I was doing workouts right now that indicated I could run sub 1:50, then I wouldn't be in ~1:56 shape haha. I'm also not the type of guy who can run 6:30 pace for every run I do and get away with it. Especially during 'season.' I would like to address my endurance over the summer, though.

NWARunner - Thanks man. I'm trying not to strain much during aerobic workouts. I could probably be doing those CV reps a little quicker, but I don't plan to drastically change anything since I'm already in the middle of my season basically.

In general, I think I just have a crappy vo2 max because I struggle with the kind of work near those paces. I will talk more about future racing and training plans next time I post an update. I gotta go run now.

VO2 work is very hard for middle distance runners. It is not supposed to be easy, especially if you are underdeveloped. This kind of thing will take time - and fwiw, I think doing 400s with 30 seconds rest or something then slowly working up to 800s and 1000s is a great idea - but it is absolutely essential if you want to improve.

This is the study that I pulled my numbers from, and if you want proof that you need to run at 90+% of VO2max in order to make real gains, look no further than here. Particularly of note; that is 90% as a measure of oxygen, not velocity. 90% of oxygen is like 95% of velocity. Based off your 15:49, your VO2max pace is roughly 5:04. 95% of that is 5:20 pace, which is 3:20 for the 1k. Considering that 90% mark is really a threshold of the slowest you can go and still get the full benefit, I would say you should at least try to hit 3:20 for your workouts, and don't be afraid to lower the volume a bit or shorten the reps (adjusting rest accordingly) in order to hit faster than 80 seconds per 400.

This is very important that you recognize this; your aerobic ability, and lack thereof, is cyclical. You cannot accomplish the level of training at those paces because that is a weakness of yours, and so it remains a weakness. It's hard to break out of, and sometimes you kind of have to go to the well a little in those first few sessions to get over the hump. There's no easy answer, but it must be done if you want to accomplish your goal (always remember, the 800 is 66% aerobic, and without a fully developed aerobic system you will never reach your true peak).