Tag Archives: interval training

As I finished my run this morning, going past the house twice to make sure Map My Run agreed it was two miles, I said to myself, “This is great!  Two Mile Tuesday is back!”  Then I said, “You idiot, it’s Wednesday,” echoing Boris Karloff is one of my favorite Tuesday memes.

Tee hee!

In fact, it is like a Friday for many, because they have the rest of the week off for Thanksgiving.  I was euphoric when I finally had a job that gave me that perk (or is it “perq” short for “perquisite”?  Discuss amongst yourselves).  But I have covered the vagaries of three day weeks in this space before.  Right now I was hoping to make a Running Commentary.

I got up early, because I went to bed early last night (Tired Tuesday, remember?).  I thought I would do something different and go running right away, even before I had coffee.  For one reason, it was not raining. It was pouring yesterday morning, so I did not run, although I took a nice walk later. On Monday’s run, I started experimenting with interval training, that is, interspersing my normal slow shuffle with bursts of greater speed and effort (why did autocorrect capitalize “greater”?  And why does my computer underline “auto-correct”?) (OH, it wants a hyphen.  Who knew?) (Oh you probably did) (you know who you are) (but I digress).

Actually, from what I learned in the army, there is interval training and fartlek workouts (tee hee, I said “fart”!).  In interval training, your slower and faster periods are set; for example, on a oval track, sprint the straightaway, run slower on the curvy parts.  In fartlek, things are more irregular: “You’ll sprint till I tell you to stop sprinting!”  Of course, this may have been just some sergeant’s definition.

Oh, according to Google, it is unstructured!  I looked it up to make sure I was spelling it correctly. Also, it is meant to be fun.  I’m sure that wasn’t part of the sergeant’s definition, but I will certainly remember it the next time I put on the old running shoes!

Anyways, I ran for just over 30 minutes, doing a kind of a sprint about every five minutes. I say a kind of a sprint, because with my speed or lack thereof, an unbiased observer might not have recognized it as a sprint.  I would decide to sprint to a certain point, a telephone pole, a corner, that sort of thing, looking at my Garmin at the beginning and end.  My sprints lasted from ten to twenty seconds.  I figure that gives me something to build on.

I am thinking I will try to do the Reindeer Run 5K in Little Falls Dec. 14.  Regular readers may remember that I have done it before; it is a fun event put together by good people, the Rock City Runners.  I may not be in quite the shape I like to be for a 5K, but I could stretch a point.  After all, as I have often said, round and puffy is a shape.