Thursday Session – Fartlek Freestyle

12 April 2017 - By James Crisp

This Thursday’s session is a Fartlek session in Maldon. We’ve have reccied a new route that is well-lit, very flat and wide enough for various ability groups to pass each other freely. Fartlek means ‘speed play’ and is designed to improve fitness quickly but this Thursday we are going to let you have a bit of Freestyle fun with it.

We will meet in the Tesco car park in Maldon for 7:30pm near the top end near the ‘Click & Collect’ bays. Following the briefing we will head onto the cycle/footpath behind Tesco for a usual warm up jog and finish in Oak Tree Meadow on the other side of the river to complete our warm up.

After our warm up, we will split into our usual ability groups and each group will be given a leader to start with. The Freestyle part of the session is going to be that each group leader will select a pace and distance to run the effort at before changing to the active recovery. We will ask you to change group leader approx every 5 minutes throughout the session to give everyone a turn. We are hoping that this will add some fun to the session being able to select your own effort pace and distance. The route is regularly marked with lamp posts ( and poo bins 😉 ) so you have easy targets to set a distance by.

So, to give you an example, the first group leader may start off with an effort at tempo pace to last for 4 lamp posts, then within the active recovery part the leader will then choose the next effort which could be a sprint to the next lamp post. You will have a recovery that is long enough for the effort you have just completed. Each effort will be given to the group within the recovery stage and can be as varied as you see fit. For example, you could have 2 short sprint efforts with a short recovery in between or 2 longer tempo pace efforts with a longer recovery in between. This session can be as creative and varied as you choose!

As usual the efforts will last for 30 minutes with a cool down and stretches afterwards.

If you are returning from injury or are having a recovery week from recent races, please let us know and I will happily provide you with a personal target for the session.

Rach and I look forward to seeing you all soon!

Happy Running!!