RFTS Day 18 – round and round and round…

Another 11,47 km for the Run for the Sun today, 9 of them spent on the track going round and round and round… It’s a little tough mentally, but doable with some music and an audio-book. At least there are no cars and the course is really flat, so that you can concentrate on your running and don’t have to pay attention on other things as for example not tripping over someone’s dog or getting hit by a car.As I announced yesterday, today was fartlek training, and I can hear you English-speaking people sniggering. I assume that most of you are familiar with the concept, for those who aren’t here’s a quick explanation:

It’s a training-method from Scandinavia, where „fart“ means „speed“, and „lek“ means „play“. So the idea is to play with your running-speed. (It has nothing to do with the English meaning of „fart“, unless you had a really special breakfast beforehand. 🙂 ) There are several options:

First: You are totally and completely free. You run at a comfy pace and then you see something that seems worth running towards it, increasing your speed. Like: „Hey, that’s a nice looking tree over there! Let’s sprint the 200m towards it!“ or: „Great hill! I wonder, how fast I can go up there.“ In between those landmarks you just jog along at your comfy pace. I think, that’s the original idea of the whole thing.

Second: You are building a „speed pyramid“, meaning that you start at a slow pace, then you go fast, return to your slow pace, than you go even faster than the first time, return to your slow pace…  You get the idea?

Third and most boring of all: You just alternate between two speeds. That’s what I did today. Going slow for 600 m, then going a little faster for 600 m, going slow again and so on.

By regulating speed and distance you get of course the „lek“ element completely out of it, leaving only the „fart“… Ok, this could get out of hand, so I better stop here… 😉

 

I did the last 600 m of the training bare feet on the infield, leaving my poor new shoes staring at the track. I really like the Kinvara. It’s a great shoe.

The weather was quite nice. Warm but not hot, a little windy, but not too much. I enjoyed it.

This time, there was no one else on the track or the bleachers. I was glad not to find the skeleton of the guy who sat there last week.

See you tomorrow!