Fartlek Fursday

This week I have started introducing speed work into my routine. This is taking the form of fartleks; a fast burst followed by a recovery period repeated numerous times.

As the weather has been so wet John, Kevin and I opted for running on the road as opposed to grass laps. There are a couple of Strava segments nearby, each around 0.2 miles in length. We decided to use one as the fast section and the other for the recovery.

I was looking forward to pushing myself but had forgotten how hard this type of training is. Long runs hurt, but in a completely different way to speed sessions. On a long one it is fatigue rather than pain that gets to you. By the end of the marathon it is pain too, but for most of the time it is a mental battle to keep going when your body would like to stop.

With these sessions the pain is pretty instant and takes the form of stinging lactic acid and lung burn. You can see the end but it seems to take forever to get there despite travelling much faster than normal. As soon as I stop it feels as though someone has lit a match and dropped it down my throat.

Unfortunately, this is how you earn PB’s at 5k, 10k and even half marathon distances. There is no getting around it. Of course, over time you can do more with less pain as your lungs and legs become accustomed to it. The key is to persevere.

Fortunately, I have good friends running with me to ensure I do the sessions and do them well. I have always struggled to fartlek alone! I also have the experience from hill work of overcoming this barrier and seeing the results. Earlier this year we began steep hill runs and initially struggled to do five short reps. Eventually reaching the point where we managed ten long reps.

Today my best segment time was 1:20, five seconds off my PB. We will see how that improves over the coming weeks and that should lead to improvements for the distances I mentioned above.