I know extrapolating fitness from isolated workouts is far from exact but I’m curious what a consensus is on the workout I just did since there are no races to really confirm my shape. I did 8x 300 with 1:30 rest. All were at 55 except the last two which were 54 and 51. This felt comfortably fast and never overly taxing. Two weeks before I did a similar workout except it was on a dirt track that’s ~320 and those were all hovering around 60 with the last one being a 55.
Weirdly enough, I did that same workout when I was training for an 800 even though I’d never heard it before. So all I can tell you is that for me, it ended up being that I averaged about 3 seconds per 300 slower than my 800m race pace. I hammered them though and my session was very taxing because I used it as a peaking workout. The workout and race were exactly a week apart. So idk if that information was useful but maybe it is if you’re running an 800.
300s are a good way of testing speed endurance and recovery so they should give you a good idea of your fitness in the 400-800.
I was running about 43-46 on all 300 repeats when I was in about 53 2:00 shape
crisscrosscountry wrote:
I know extrapolating fitness from isolated workouts is far from exact but I’m curious what a consensus is on the workout I just did since there are no races to really confirm my shape. I did 8x 300 with 1:30 rest. All were at 55 except the last two which were 54 and 51. This felt comfortably fast and never overly taxing.
This is a good aerobic faster session if the 1:30 was jogged, it should be about your 1500/mile pace if you have good endurance and sharpen a bit (though a little more volume would be good, say 10 x 300m, broken into two or three sets if necessary with say 2:30 ish jog rest between sets).
If the 1:30 was standing, it probably doesn't say so much; it is probably too much rest to be very aerobically challenging, and since you were comfortable you probably weren't training the anaerobic system much either. Even though it doesn't say much, it's not necessarily a bad training session, e.g. it might be a first step to getting used to the pace.
It's probably a bit slower than 800m pace but definitely not 1500m pace - you should be able to run over 8 300s @ 1500 pace with 45" jogged (100m) rest.
Looking back on my training logs, I did 9x300m in 47-48s with long rest (didn't note it down, but I believe it was 3') and then ran 2:02 a few weeks later. (46s per 300m)