Walking to faster running times

Sounds counter intuitive doesn't it? If I walk more then my times will be faster?

It puzzled me that my third run of the holiday was so much slower (almost half a minute on a 24 minute run) than my second.

There could be a number of rational explanations for this - different weather, more fatigue etc. etc. But the other difference in the runs was that in my second run, I walked about 25% of the way back to my starting point, whereas in the third run, I decided I was going to run the whole distance.

On my second run, I used the telegraph poles to ration my walking - so I guess it turned into a bit of an interval or fartlek session. I walked to one pole, jogged to the next one, and then ran through the next two before walking again.

I'm not yet convinced that run-walk is necessarily quicker for me (you certainly don't see many people doing it at the Wimbledon Common Time Trial), but this article from Jeff Galloway on Run-Walk seems to suggest it would be quicker by delaying fatigue. It may even be a way of reducing soreness or injury after the run.

So I've got a choice to make today - run-walk, or just run?

Anyone else had experiences of this? What do you think is quicker?

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...