Tuesday, September 13, 2016

Experimenting with Fartleks (Insert Joke Here)

I took yesterday as a total rest day, as even though my legs felt OK and probably would have been fine for a run, I wanted to stick to my original plan of taking the entire day off before running this week. I'm glad I did because while I felt OK yesterday, I feel even better today and feel totally confident that I'll be fine with my planned 5 miler this evening after work.

To follow on to my Run to Remember 11k race report, now that my mileage is a little bit higher, I'm going to integrate more speedwork into my weekly runs over time to get a bit faster and stronger and b.) see what types of workouts work best.

So this week I'm going to do some hill repeats of 0.25 mile each on Wednesday, and then try a fartlek run on Friday to vary my run pace a bit and see how that goes. I imagine it'll take me a couple tries to calibrate what sort of fartlek run is the most successful/useful for me, but over time I think it'll help me develop more speed, especially as we get into the drier, colder months.

So, my plan for this week of running (9/12/16 thru 09/18/16) is:

Monday: Off
Tuesday: 5 miles easy
Wednesday: 5+400m (appr.) hill repeats with 1 mile warm up and 1 mile cool down
Thursday: Off
Friday: 6 miles fartlek
Saturday: Off
Sunday: 10 miles long run

I may end up running on Saturday if I feel good as well. Another goal is to get up to running 4-5 days per week consistently, and eventually 5 days weekly.

Finally, I'm going to start doing some strength training on my off days, mostly things like runner-specific stretches or exercises (planks and whatnot), but also I would like to get back into yoga, which I did once per week way back in 2008-09 and really enjoyed, even though it kicked my ass. But that's an ongoing effort, so for right now, I'm labeling non-running days as just "off".

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