Hey running comrades!

The comrade who started these threads seems to be taking a break, and I've been slack, so apologies for the interruptions to these threads. I've still been running though, and I hope you have too! But if you haven't, please don't beat yourself up about it, none of us here are going to win an olympic marathon so it's pretty low stakes stuff, and breaks can be good for letting the body recover anyway

Link to the last thread

Anyway I thought I'd talk briefly about fartleks (it's named after the Swedish for "speed play" rather than the intermittent speed boost from jet propulsion). Assuming you're doing the vast majority of your running at an easy pace like you absolutely should (you ARE doing that, aren't you?), this is a safer and more fun way of adding some intensity/speed without doing brutal sets of intervals. The basic idea is to go on a fairly normal easy run, and then just add in bursts of higher intensity as you go. Some people do it structured, but the "intended" way of doing it is just to spontaneously decide to "run hard as far as that tree over there" or whatever and then return to normal pace, and do that a bunch during the run. However you do it, the key is just to mix up your pace a number of times during the run, potentially at a few different paces (not just "slow" and "sprint"). Not rocket science, but it's fun to just let loose and go fast once in a while, and it's good to get some speed in - especially when this way of doing it ensures you warm up and cool down properly and don't go too hard, helping reduce injury.

Anyway it's been waaaaaaay more than a week so please feel free to share all your running ups and downs from the last month or so!

I was out in the countryside on the weekend, had an amazing run on the higher ground above these beautiful mist-filled valleys, but the hills were incessant and brutal and my legs are very upset with me now. Very encouraging that I'm in half decent shape for the hilly event I'm training for though so I'm definitely calling it a win