Fartlek

Early today I was reading Late Nite Drive Thru's blog and she was talking about fartlekking. This is a form of training where you do short sprints during your normal run and then recover at your normal running speed. So I thought I would try this during my lunchtime run. I didn't begin until I was down on the trail, which comprises about 3 out of the 4 miles of my run. For ease I will refer to the sprint as the fart (as I have visions of farting and then being jet propelled to run faster) and the recovery the lek. On the outward leg of my run I was farting for 30 seconds with a 2 min lek. On the return leg, as I was getting a bit tired, I extended the lek to 3 mins. However, my last fart I managed to squeeze out for a whole minute and then I just continued my recovery run back to the office. All in all, I think I did about 8 farts. Doing this actually made my "normal" running pace seem easy. I don't know what pace Ii was actually running but I think around 8:45 for the lek and under 7:30 for the fart ( I base this on the fastest mile I have run recently which was 7:30). So my aim is to do this once a week and hopefully my running speed will improve.

I hope when I get home that my Garmin forerunner will have arrived (ordered from Amazon monday) so I will know for sure what pace I am running.