My Journey With Weight Loss – A New Type Of Training

Today was my long run which was 16k. As I had a busy morning planned I was up at 4am and hit the road before 5am. My husband called me when I was at the 10k mark and told me I sounded pretty strong as my breathing was good. I told him that was great but my legs felt like rubber. There is one thing I like about the day I do my long run, I get to have a big breakfast. Today it was a homemade whole wheat waffle (I make them ahead and freeze them so you just pop them in the toaster to reheat) with an egg. I know I need both the protein and carbs to get me through the long run as it helps give me fuel. That meant I was able to run at a pretty consistent pace for 2 1/2 hours.

My coach advised me we were going to start some new training this week, Fartleks. Fartleks is a Swedish word that means speed play (trust me, play should not be included as part of the definition of this training). The goal of Fartleks is to improve both speed and endurance. While I am less concerned about my endurance (I only need to add 5.1k to my long run and I have over 4 months to do that) I do worry about my speed. Worst case scenario is I have to be able to run the 1/2 marathon in under 3 hours because the streets are only closed for that period. My goal is to do it in 2 1/2 hours so still a ways to go (I should note my 8k this week was run at 7.8 kph so I am getting there in the shorter runs).

Fartleks is a high intensity interval training method. Basically you sprint for a short length of time and then pull back to a normal run for a length of time. The info I read said it is getting your body ready to really move when you need it to.

The training coach gave me for this week was the ‘Mona’ intervals. This Fartleks involves 90 seconds of sprinting then 90 seconds of easy running for 2 intervals, 60 seconds of sprinting then 60 seconds of easy running for 4 intervals, 30 seconds sprinting 60 seconds running for 4 intervals then finally 15 seconds of each for 4 intervals. Doesn’t this all sound easy? The best part is even after easy warm up and cool down jogs the whole thing takes only about 30 minutes.

I thought this training would be a nice break, I was wrong. For each of those sprinting intervals I ran as hard as I could. I admit the toughest intervals were the 60/60 ones because I thought my lungs were going to explode by time I got to the 3rd interval (really, your heart rate is still up there each time you start a sprint). When I got home I was soaked with sweat and I told my sister I thought I might be starting to hate my coach, this was the hardest workout I had done since I started training.

Am I going to do this again? Hell yeah! I figure if it was that hard to do this short workout then I am going to reap a lot of benefits from it. I figure a few weeks and I’ll have my 16k pace to an even better level.