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Before you Run
If you have been running for some time you will hopefully be used to steady running of varying distance. If you have followed a training schedule from this site you will also have experienced some different training sessions.
Slightly more advance training methods add some more “technical” training sessions into your schedule (whilst keeping plenty of steady running included). These sessions are still very simple to understand, and in addition to the benefits of these more advanced sessions, most runners enjoy them as something different and more interesting than the standard steady run.
The first example can be referred to as a change of pace session. You may hear it referred to as a fartlek – a Swedish term meaning “speed play”. It goes something like this:
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Run at your steady pace for, say, 10 minutes to ensure your muscles are thoroughly warmed up, then pick up your pace for a certain distance. You decide this distance – it might be to the next traffic lights, the next road you have to cross, or you could run for a certain length of time, e.g. one or two minutes. After this effort, drop back down to your steady pace for a short while, basically till you feel a little recovered, and then repeat the harder effort – but this time you might run for a different distance/amount of time. At the end of the run you may have been out for 40 minutes (the amount of time you run for is up to you, and will depend on where you are with your training/fitness level) but the run will have been chopped up into efforts of varying lengths, and therefore speeds, and also the “steady” bits will be of different lengths too. The idea is that you do not stop in this kind of session, you are always moving along and you will have raised your heart rate to higher levels than it would reach if you’d just done a steady run.
The second example is an interval session. This has similar effects to a change of pace session but it is more structured. In this type of session you set yourself a target of a certain number of efforts, and you plan a set amount of recovery time between each effort. More often this type of session would be done in one place using the same route for each effort (it might be around a field, along a path, sometimes even on a running track).
An example could be to do 5 efforts of 1km with, say, 2 minutes recovery between each effort. It’s best to keep moving during your recoveries, a slow jog will suffice (even if it is round and round in circles). If you do not know the exact length or the route you are running, you can run for a certain time instead, say 3 minute efforts with 2 minute recovery periods. As always, a training session like this should always incorporate a good warm-up and warm-down.
