It’s certainly not a runner’s favorite thing to do, but from time to time we have to jump on a treadmill for our workouts, especially during marathon training season.
Since I don’t like being on the treadmill for very long I use this time to do speed work and wanted to highlight one of my favorite workouts to do indoors – Yasso 800’s. Basically these are 800 meter repeats (1/2 mile) done at a specific and easy to calculate speed. Here’s how to figure it:
Take your marathon goal time, we’ll use 4 hours as an example, and run your 800’s in that amount of minutes. So if your goal time for a marathon is 4 hours you need to run each 800 repeat in 4 minutes, or 2 minutes per lap, with that same amount of jogging (4 minutes) as a recovery period. The goal is to work up 10. To figure pace just double your repeat time. So for the same 4 h marathon and 4 minute repeat you are running an 8 minute mile.
These are great to do on a treadmill because you can easily control the speed of your intervals. They are also one of my favorite track workouts too so don’t limit them strictly to indoor running.
Here’s a quick reference chart for doing Yasso 800’s indoors. I have rounded up on pace to make speed settings exact for treadmill workouts. You may also want to adjust your incline to compensate for wind resistance and the lack of normal road conditions.
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Isn’t running inside healthier because of the heavy breathing of pollutions in the air from outside? Please correct me if I’m wrong.
Another great suggestion! Wish I would have had this while traveling recently! Definitely would have out a little excitement into my hotel gym activity!