I knew this would grab your attention. No, it’s not something my 5-year-old came up with, but it’s an actual word….in Swedish…meaning “speed play.”
In any good training program for running, you need at least 3 major types of workouts a week: a long, slow run; a tempo run; and speed work. Usually, runners head to the local high school track to work on speed, timing themselves as they loop the track, etc. That’s great, beneficial, but can also be monotonous. If you’re looking for something to help you w/ your speed that is pure FUN, try fartleks!
My running buddy and I meet once a week early on Sunday mornings after a long hiatus from running together. We trained for a half marathon all last winter and those weekly runs were all about long, slow runs to build endurance. But since that half, we’ve both not really had a race goal and have just been winging our individual running plans. So when we finally started running together again a few weeks ago, we were lost. Were we training for speed, endurance, what? Last week, we were bored and just not feeling it. She was talking about doing some speed work on the treadmill and how super-boring that was. That’s when it hit us. Let’s just sprint and run with wild abandon like we did when we were 10, racing toward the playground at recess. Just run and run fast!
And we did.
We’d pick a landmark and say “go!” and then run 200 meters or so at what ended up being a 5:02 minute mile pace per my Garmin GPS running watch. Man! Me? Running that fast? That was nothing but fun. That was a fartlek.
We jogged for recovery in between crazy all-out sprints and did it several more times.
This is the idea behind fartlek training. Change up your run, throw in bursts of sprints in between recovery jogs, and feel the burn. My muscles were like, “Huh?”… I was sore for two days after. But sore in a good way.
So if you’re wanting to build speed and are bored w/ the track or treadmill, try this. Here is a more informative article written by an expert.
http://ironman.com/training/17
Have a good run and don’t be embarrassed if you fartlek!
Scarlette
