Tip of the Week: Do Fartleks. Don't Giggle.

Friday night, I headed out on a Fartlek workout. Yep, it's a funny word. My well-educated Pharmacist wife always says "Ewwww... you LICKED your FARTS!" And then she giggles. Classy. (But that's why I love her!)

It's sort of like intervals, but you mix up the "interval" used. I basically did hard efforts of 3, 2, 4, 1, and 5 minutes. And the rest was running easy for 50% of the time of the previous interval.

I warmed up for an easy mile, picked up the pace for another half mile, and then really got to work. I did did 3:00 hard, 1:30 easy, 2 h, 1 e, 4 h, 2 e, 1 hard, 0:30 easy, 5 h, 2:30 easy. Then I repeated the whole set again, but skipped the final 5:00 hard because I was already under a mile from home, so I just used the rest of that as a cool-down. (I'm used to running around 1-mile intervals, but it was the shorter, faster running I'm not used to. So I figured skipping a longer fartlek interval would be the way to go.)

So, here's my "Tip of the Week:" Mix up your pace. Don't run all easy runs at one pace, all long runs at another, and all tempo runs at another. Try a fartlek workout of different distances / paces within the same workout to confuse your body a bit.

AND it's a great chance to leave your Garmin at home and run them all "by feel." You don't need all the numbers for this workout; just run hard when you're supposed to be running hard, and ease up between the hard parts. I feel like I just read something in Runners World Magazine about the importance of having trained at different paces so on race day your body won't "freak out" if it's not exactly the pace you trained for.

Go. Try it. Mix up the lengths. Say "fartlek." Don't giggle.

Oh, and I ran this workout as just my 2nd run in a new pair of running shoes. (My first run was Henry's long run with me 8 days ago, but I brought my older running shoes in the stroller in case my feet didn't like the new shoes.) My feet got a little beat up from the fartlek:

Photo taken 2 days after the fartlek workout.

That's a blood blister right over the area where I had gotten a regular blister from the City of Lakes 25K about 3 weeks ago. Notice my toes and the bottom of my feet still look a little beat-up from that race.

Gross.

But seriously... try a fartlek workout.