Fartleks – 4 Miles

by Blue Tapp Scheffer

Yesterday Craig and I ran 4 miles of fartleks at the St. Louis Community College track at Florissant Valley. It’s a pretty funny word… “fartleks.” I wouldn’t even say the word at first after I started reading about them in “Runner’s World” magazine. Even now I brush over the “t” very quickly when I say it so that it doesn’t sound so much like… well… fart! But I gotta say it now and then because fartleks are an integral part of running training.

Fartlek means “speed play” in Swedish and, simply explained, fartleks are interval training – running fast then slow then fast, etc.. There are hundreds of ways to do them. You can do timed fartleks by running fast and slow for a certain amount of seconds or minutes. Or you can try distance fartleks where you run fast and slow for a certain distance. This is speed training and helps you get faster by raising your anaerobic threshold (running fast enough that your body cannot create oxygen for your muscles).

Usually a fartlek session will start off with a shorter distance or time, then increase the distance or time and then decrease again. For example, for timed fartleks start with a slow jog of a mile to warm up. Then run fast for 30 seconds and slow jog for 30 seconds. Run fast for 60 seconds and then slow jog for 60 seconds. Run fast for 90 seconds and then slow jog for 90. Take the times back down again: 60 seconds and 30 seconds. End with another mile slow jog to cool down. The times or distances can be anything you want.

I prefer distance fartleks because they are a bit easier since you get longer easy jogs between the heart-pounding fast runs. Craig and I start off with a slow mile (4 laps around the track). Our first fartlek is halfway around the track fast and halfway around slow. Then we run an entire lap fast and a slow lap and then a lap and a half and then back down. We finish with three more slow jogged laps which completes 4 miles. It is much harder than it sounds. We hate these. They hurt.

But they really do make you faster. I have been very surprised by how well fartlek training works. I had always thought that you had to just run harder to be faster. But after several fartlek sessions I noticed that the time it took me to run a mile kept getting shorter and shorter. I felt like I was running the same pace as before but I was just faster. That was pretty exciting.

So because they work so amazingly well, and because Craig and I are short squat little folks who aren’t naturally very speedy, we try to get in fartlek sessions once a week while we’re training for a race.

REMINDER! It’s not too late to sign up for the St. Patrick’s Day 5 Mile Run this Saturday! Register HERE!