Yasso 800s take the place of a workout that’s more relevant, but I’ve heard they’re a good test of your fitness or not - meaning that if you’re in the middle of marathon mileage and can’t hit it, you won’t be able to run that pace for a race.
They don’t work for young or lower mileage runners though - when I was a senior in HS, I could easily run 10x800 in 2:30 with 2:30 west, but I couldn’t run a 2:30 marathon. I may even have been able to run them between 2:20-2:22 but this would be going to the well, but I sure as hell couldn’t run a near OTQ time at 18.
1) You’re right there is no reason to go over 90 minutes unless you’re racing over 90 minutes. The glycogen depletion is only a detriment to shorter then marathon racing. And it doesn’t matter what day of the week you run longer. Africans do Thursday long runs.
2) 1km is a good intervals distance for elites. However, non elites would get the same benefit from half mile repeats.
3) The 20 minute tempo is a horrible workout. As you said most turn it into a time trial, which is contrary to the point of it. I’ve never seen an elite African runner share that they did 20 minute tempos. Instead they’re doing 40+ minutes of either threshold intervals or steady state.
This was Igloi's go-to that he could pull out of his hat at any time.
It might be fresh swing, good speed, broken into 4 sets of 5, it didn't matter. It was still 20x440.
I ran some variant of this so many times in 3 years that after I left Igloi, I never ran another session of quarter miles again.
Do you happen to have a good memory for some of the other workouts? I have tried to learn all I can about Igloi training in the last few years. There were a couple former athletes that I got workout plans from, I think one of them has sadly passed on. It's a fascinating system, but it seems like it is at least as mentally hard as physically hard... Which is to say, quite difficult!
I have 3 years of training logs.
But just saying what was run on a particular day tells very little.
You have to be familiar with the terminology to understand what was being done, e.g., good speed is different from good swing. Why is another matter. :) And everyone, when they had left Igloi, made changes of one sort or another.
The speeds are Easy, Fresh, Good, Hard, Very Hard and All Out. The tempos are swing and speed. The regular training distances were 100m, 150m, 220 yds, 440 yds, 880 yds.
As you can see, the number of variables is large.
Those who knew the system the best were Lazlo Tabori, Joe Douglas, Merle Magee. Others included John Bork, Bob Schul and me. And while each of us based at least some part of our training, and that of those we helped, on Igloi, no two were exactly the same.
Amby Burfoot asked me if someone could do "full bore Igloi training today". I replied "No, because Igloi is dead".
There is a lot of Igloi-related stuff on these forums, written by the late Orville Atkins. Check it out.