Tuesday Night’s Run – Fartleks

As I mentioned before, I joined the Dallas Running Club training program.  The training program consists of a 14 week program with two group runs a week as well as your own personalized training plan.  The personalized training plan is based upon your pace group so that you will know the speed of the different runs you are completing.  The Saturday group runs are the longer runs and increase and mileage each week while the Tuesday night runs are for speed work and hills.

Tuesday night was my first Tuesday group run.  I missed the first week because I was sick so I definitely didn’t want to miss out.  I knew based upon the schedule that we were doing 35 minutes of running including farleks.  But I really didn’t know what a fartlek was and what it entailed (other than speed work).

I looked at the definition and was still slightly confused. 

Fartlek - Purpose:  Increase aerobic capacity.  Technique: Over the duration of a workout, run varying intervals of a faster running from 30 seconds to 3 minutes and easy paced running of similar Faster paced running to be at VO2max pace or slightly slower.  Easy pace should be slow enough to provide adequate recovery.  Example: 15 min warm up, 6 x 3:00 @ VO2 Pace with 3:00 recovery, 15 min cool down.  

Our pace group leader sent out another example and I was still pretty confused.  The weather was nice so I figured I would go to the run and hopefully learn something new. 

Sorry for the poor picture quality!

For my evening run, I decided to wear my BCG running leggings and my BCG hoodie.  I had planned on wearing a headlamp because I knew it would be dark but the one I had started giving me a major headache so I didn’t go with it but I did wear my SlapLit LED Band so that I had at least something that lit up.  I personally love the SlapLit because 1) it is a slap bracelet (so it makes me think of my childhood) and 2) it makes me at least a little visible in the dark.

Tuesday night’s run started at 7 and we started with a light 10 minute warm up.  Our base run is supposed to be slow and conversational so I typically talk to the other people in the group.  After the warm up, we started our first fartlek.  Basically this means we run fast for 1-3 minutes and then slow back down to our slow pace.  Not too bad, although at one point I looked down and we were doing 8:30 mile which was definitely a little faster than I thought we were supposed to do, but I was able to do it so it was all good! 

Throughout our run we did several fartleks and finished off in 43 minutes.  So Tuesday’s run was a first for me but it was a good one!