Fartlek: I just love saying that

Fartlek.  Do you know what it means?  I'm impressed if you do.  First of all, I just love the word because it's rather provocative and catches people's attention when you say it.  It even sounds slightly offensive.  The second reason I love it is that it gives you an awesome workout.  It's a Swedish word that means "speed play" and it's a common training tool especially for runners.  It's common because it's so effective.  My track coaches would torture us with them back in the day and now I find myself regularly incorporating them into our workouts.  Hence the tortured becomes the torturer.  But I love it and so does hubby.  They stink at the time you're doing them but they work really well.  I am sitting here with legs (especially the hammies), glutes and obliques that are quite sore from our fartlek workout on Thursday morning.  I'm always pleasantly surprised at how worked out my core gets - my abs/obliques are often sore following a good fartlek workout.

So here's what we did.  There's a squarish path that goes around a big sports field area at the park near our house.  I haven't formally measured it but it's probably slightly larger than a track.  We warmed up by jogging to the park with Z in her stroller.  Once we got to the path, we would sprint down one side of the track, turn the corner and jog to the next corner, sprint again, then turn the corner and walk to recover.  We repeated that four times for this workout and that was plenty.  We took turns pushing the stroller each lap.  Then we cooled down while Z played on the playground toys and jogged home.  It was quick and intense and tough work but it felt great. 

So to do a typical fartlek, you just follow the pattern of sprint, jog, sprint, walk and repeat as needed.  You usually do about the same amount of distance for each interval.  The beauty is that you set the pace.  Sprint simply means trying to push it and run faster than you typically do jogging.  Doing it on a track is probably the ideal situation:  you would sprint the straightaway, jog the curve, sprint straightaway again and walk the curve.  You can apply this concept to several settings.  You can do it on a treadmill and adjust the speed setting while watching the mileage gauge.  You can apply the concept to a street or stationary bike ride.  Any fitness machine, really.  You get the idea.

Try it.  Get yourself outside your comfort zone.  That's what effective workouts are all about anyway:  pushing it just enough to make that difference.