Is Yasso for Real?

Can anyone tell me, from experience, if Bart Yasso and his theory are for real? Cause honestly, I think he must be smoking crack…yes, you read that right. According to Yasso’s theory running, what is it, 8-10, 10-12? 800s at a preset pace is a good predictor of how fast a person can run the marathon. If I understand the theory correctly, if you can run and hold a set pace for say 10 of them (10 is the number that most comes to mind) you can run a marathon at that equivalent, so if you ran 800s at 4:00 pace, you could run a 4 hour marathon, in theory. Recovery I’ve always heard is either half the distance, 400, or a recovery time of the distance you ran (4:00 800, 4:00 recovery), I typically just go the half distance and end up about 30 seconds less on recovery than on the repeat itself with a walk right after, light jog and then a walk just before starting the new one…I originally was even going to do these on a track, unfortunately the two tracks near me had football practice and while I still probably could’ve used the track, I didn’t want to interfere, so I chose to run around home and used my Garmin, but I even switched it over to metric so I wasn’t running half miles, but true 800s. I have a path near me that is just under a half mile around, so I have to run just over one loop around it for my runs and it’s pretty consistently flat except for a bump where there is a bridge…I set my Garmin for 10 of them, not knowing what my foot was going to be doing and figuring that was good for the confidence boost I maybe needed, I wanted to hit these at 3:35, my hoped for marathon pace. First a mile warm up, and foot felt fine, not tinges of anything so that is good. Then I did my 800s…

800 1: 3:37
800 2: 3:15
800 3: 3:15
800 4: 3:28
800 5: 3:25
800 6: 3:23
800 7: 3:22
800 8: 3:54 – this one was off, didn’t lose signal, but I know where I should’ve stopped and Garmin had me keep going, so no idea what was wrong, but pace felt about the same as the others
800 9: 3:23
800 10: 3:23
800 11: 3:24
800 12: 3:24

OK, there is my typical inconsistency, although I could say it looks almost to average around the 3:25 range…hence my assumption that Yasso must be smoking crack cause there is no way I’m ready to run a 3:25 marathon…the only thing about his theory that hits me though is that last training cycle, I did a set of 10 or 12 of these and pretty much ran 3:42s and that is what I ran for my marathon…sigh…OK so I wanted this to give me confidence and I don’t know how these made me feel!! But at least the foot is better. It must’ve been a pulled muscle like I was thinking, how I pulled it no idea, but I’ve been icing it and it’s feeling fine now. I iced again tonight just to be safe and will continue icing it into the weekend…I did get a different kind of weird ache along my upper quad or hamstring, not quite groin area, no idea what that might be, but it wasn’t till later in the run and could be cause of the colder weather later and tightening up. Anyway, just wanted to get this in tonight so I could not think about it tomorrow when I’m sure I’ll be swamped at work. Oh, and finished 11 miles in 1:41 or so...not a bad night. But I still don't believe/trust the times, even though I know my Garmin is on, I've tested it over measured distances...