Week 4 - Monday

Keep rollin’, rollin’, rollin'

I really, really, really didn’t want to let yesterday’s horrific strength session put me off. I mean, if anything I wanted to put it behind me as “most recent exercise” so was glad to get out and actually run. It’s a deload week, but that seems to mean lower overall distance but still some hard efforts.

Rolling 300s

Today was a Fartlek session, alternating paces for 300 metres at a time. Quoting runna.com’s lexicon:

7. Fartlek: [Insert chuckle here] The Swedish word for “speed play,” a fartlek is a speedwork format that involves varying your pace during a run by alternating between fast and slow intervals for however long you want.

This is what I was supposed to do:

• 1km conversational pace warm up
  • This has been slightly increased to 6:00/km, from 6:05/km previously
• 4 sets of:
  • 300 metres @ 5:00/km
  • 300 metres @ 5:45/km
• 1km conversational pace cool down

Instead of seeking out some specific piece of road or path to run repeatedly, this time I figured I’d just use a modified version of my normal local 5km street route.

Here it is on Strava.

Hey, I think I did pretty well there. I feel like I had fewer warnings about going too fast than in last week’s sessions, plus the paces on the app actually transfer to the watch as pace windows, so there’s leeway anyway. This is what the Garmin said:

It actually felt pretty tough, tbh, but I guess it’s supposed to. Hopefully. I’m surprised the cooldown wasn’t as slow as the warmup, it felt much harder. Anyway. I didn’t run any further, despite not liking running under 5km, but I did go for a reasonably nice wander around the lake before buying caffeine and kefir on the way home. Runna AI popped up and said, hey, your pacing isn’t variable any more, you’re spot on. That was nice.

Looked ahead at the schedule and am feeling somewhat trepidatious about Friday, and next Monday, but what will be will be.