The Fat Runner does Fartlek

Fartlek - no sniggering in the back please...

As promised in his Friday night post, The Fat Runner got out into Kensington Gardens on Saturday morning for a 5k run (31:30 or so) and then again on Sunday morning for the same run (31:00 or so).

For the Sunday run, TFR decided to do some Fartlek - mainly because he didn't think he'd be able to keep running for the whole 5k. As regular readers know, he hasn't been able to train as consistently as he'd like given his Plantar Fasciitis injury.

So what is Fartlek? Well Fartlek is Swedish for "Speed play" and it is basically a relatively unstructured session with a mix of running speeds - from walk up to sprint.

TFR ran for around 15 mins before beginning his speed play session - probably roughly a quarter walking, a quarter slow jog, a quarter running, and then a quarter at around 400m pace...

And the interesting thing is, even with the amount of walking, the total time for the run was less than the day before.

Of course, this might just be part of TFR getting used to running again after his plantar fasciitis rehabilitation, or it could mean that this is the fastest way for him to run...

If nothing else, Fartlek certainly makes the training session more interesting, and they say that it increases fitness more quickly.

The summary - TFR is going to be building Fartlek into at least half of his training sessions going forward...