Fartlek

I had a tempo run scheduled for this morning, but I wasn't feeling it. My legs were still a little tired from my 13 miler Tuesday and it was snowing and windy. I mean legit gale force winds that rattled my windows and blew stuff down outside all night. So instead I just decided to head out and see where the run took me. I knew I wanted to work in some speed and some hills and maybe both! I would do an improv fartkek.

I ran into the wind for the first 15 minutes so I just took it easy to give my legs a chance to warm up. My next 15ish minutes were on a fairly flat stretch and the wind was at my back so I decided to do 1 minute intervals fast with 1 minute slow to recover. I got in 5 of them before I reached the end of that road and turned onto a big uphill. Since the hill was there I decided to make that the next portion of my workout. I did 15 minutes of hill repeats- luckily the wind was at my back on the uphills. The last 15 minutes I thought would be a nice cool-down, but instead I struggled hard against the wind to get home.

I know that if I had a scheduled workout I would have been fighting the wind. I would have been angry at the wind and angry at my beeping Garmin telling me to pick it up. Instead, I actually enjoyed my run because I fit my workout to where I was at each particular point. I finally managed to embrace the play that is the very essence of the term fartlek.



Anyone else Fartlek today?