Thursday 9 January 2025
Week 1, Day 4: Running Jo Fartlek
Tonight’s session was a ‘Running Jo Fartlek’ which is 6 x (2m 30s on, 2m 30s float).
I’ve done this before and (no offence Jo, as I know it’s a favourite of yours), find it tough. I’m trying to establish a new, athlete-led (ie. not coached) session for the Cheltenham Harriers on a Thursday evening.
I think a lot of the runners would benefit from a second session, but also selfishly, to give me more people to train with as solo reps are just not the one. So far (we’re only two weeks in…) this has been going well and there has been a small group of us turn up each week. Unfortunately, it does take far more time as I would previously warm up from the front door whereas now we meet at the track, which is too far for me to run.
The weather has been so cold, so I just couldn’t face getting all my cycling gear on to freeze to death on the way over, lock my bike up, sort kit etc etc… As the session was a little nearer home, I decided to jog over, so did a longer warm up than I would usually do.
The session itself went ok. Ok, but not great. I don’t know if it was GPS error, or the cold, or the longer warm up, or general fatigue, or me just not trying hard enough, but I couldn’t hit the target times Jo had set for me (~3:35/km for the efforts, 4:15/km for the floats). I felt like I was running hard enough (RPE 6-7 for the efforts, RPE 5 for the floats) but I’d look down at my watch and it would say 3:55-4:00/km. Maybe today just was not my day.
Regardless, it’s another session ticked off and some more hard running banked.
It’s very easy to think ‘oh, that wasn’t a perfect session so it’s worthless’ when you’ve got out, banked some miles and ‘ran hard for a bit’. And I do believe that no one session makes a difference. It’s getting out there, day after day, session after session, which is what makes the difference.