Fartlek

Today's session was supposed to be "60 minute off-road and hilly fartlek session". Of course it was dark by the time I was ready to run so I did the session on the roads. I wasn't 100% sure exactly what a Fartlek session was. After a bit of internet browsing, I found out that Fartlek was originally devised by a swedish guy and is swedish for "speed play". The general idea is to go for an off-road run, preferably where it is hilly and to vary your pace as much as possible, with lots of sprints and effort runs and recovery jogs in between. The other key is that it is a personal session in that you judge the distance and intensity of your efforts as the body allows it as opposed to interval sessions of set distances and pace.

Although my chosen route was on the road it was a suitably hilly route. I started with ten minutes of easy jogging to warm up, then as I was at the bottom of a hill, I ran at a fast pace for 1.8km to the top of the hill. Following this, I jogged to the bottom of Beeches Walk in Carshalton Beeches, I then ran hard up this road and jogged back down The Warren to make a 1200m loop, I repeated this another two times. I then did another two loops, but I varied it by sprinting to the next lampost, then jogging slowly to the next, then sprint, then jog and so on. After this I jogged on home.

The session lasted 63 minutes and was hard but it felt rewarding and was similar to the sort of sessions I used to do at the running club.

I should imagine I will be aching tomorrow.

Run stats: 63:01 minutes, 7.53 miles - pace is irrelevant