15 miles at your goal marathon pace is a good hard pre race workout. If I can do that I know I'm right on target. Of course everything is relative and its generally true that the slower the runner the closer their training pace is to their race pace, but, all things being equal the 15 mile MP run is a good test.

800m repeats are a decent workout, but I wouldn't rely on them as a predictor or as something to set a goal pace by. Your goal pace should be determined by a multitude of factors; your warmup races, your long run performances, your over all training consistency, and of course the conditions on race day. 800m repeats would fall in somewhere far behind all of these.

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"A society is defined not only by what it creates, but by what it refuses to destroy."
John Sawhill

Good question, I would do the half, or another distance that you can benchmark off. You can always do a 10k, or 10 miles and plug your results into a race predictor formula too.

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"I really wish you would post more often. You always have some good stuff to say. I copied it below just in case someone missed it." BarryP to Chainpin on 10/21/06

The Yasso-800 is probably a better predictor for someone who runs 50 miles per week than anyone with a lesser mileage. I don't think any amount of 15 milers will prepare you for what the last 10 miles of the marathon feel like, unless you go very easy at the start of your race. There are a lot of variables in running a marathon, whether you are doing it just to finish, or whether you want to race it. However I know people who have never run more than 14 miles at a time in training who have run fast marathons, but I presume that they could have run still faster, had they trained properly - and, of course, a lot of people don't actually train for the IM marathon, since they expect a mixture of walking and running by that stage anyway. A 15 mile RACE time coupled with sufficient run training ought to give you a time to shoot for though - there are charts that try to predict that - I've found that Jack Daniels' (not the drink) charts are fairly consistent with my times - but others may find different.j



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My experience is that Yasso 800s are a good indicator of how well I can run 800 repeats, but not a good indicator of my marathon fitness.

When I was in my 20s, my marathon times were around 3 hours, but my 800 repeat times predicted 10 minutes faster. In my late 40s, Yasso 800s predicted that I should run about 3:10 for a marathon, but I can still run 3:01.

Your mileage may vary.

Stopped Clock