Back on Track

Now the title of the post may give you the assumption that the wheels had fallen off my training schedule but rest assured nothing of the sorts has occured.
The alarm went off at 5:15 am, not a glimmer of light in the sky and a kitchen without even a banana to eat. At least there was coffee and some dates. Dates are a great training fuel, in fact it is claimed that dates contain everything you need to live on, think of it this way for thousands of years Bedouins crossed deserts with nothing but dates salt and water. Now this has nothing at all to do with my training today other than to reinforce the point that when I arrived at the track I was not hungry and had enough energy for an hour session. So think about using natural food instead of gels and gu's for a change.
There was a laarge group of at least 40 of us this morning in the dawn light as we ran 2000m warm up then did some drill strides which pulled and strained some muscles that I had not felt since the marathon.
Coach Gavin looked at me and said " That since I had done the marathon last week, my schedule for the track today was to be 800 repeats at faster than marathon pace."
The 800' repeats have become a legendary staple of marathon runners made famous by Bart Yasso of Runners World USA, the formula is that the time it takes to run 800 repeats indicates your potential marathon time: hence a running a 3:47 800 would basically translate into a 3 Hour 47 Minute Marathon.
There is more to this theory and I will write more on the succcess I have had using 800's in the past in nother entry.
My time last week for the Tiberius marathon was 4:04:01, so my goal pace today was to run sub 4:00 800 splits.
#1 3:47, #2 3:40, #3 3:43, #4 3:46, #5 3:47. By this stage my legs were hurting and I was happy with all my times, I had planned to do only 4 repeats but was psyched enough to push out a fifth. Followed by a 800 cooldown , all up about 7km on the track this morning
I like being back on track.
Mal