"I don't want to talk to you no more, you empty-headed animal-food-trough wiper. I fart in your general direction." ~ French Soldier in Monty Python and the Holy Grail
"The only thing that bothers me is if I'm in a restaurant and I'm eating and someone says, "Hey, mind if I smoke?" I always say, 'No. Mind if I fart?'" ~ Steve Martin
We here at Dan Horvath's Running Blog have high ethical and moral standards. All types of Toilet humor, potty, and scatological humor is strictly off the table. (Maybe on the seat, but most assuredly NOT on the table.) So don't look for any fart humor here, (other than the initial two quotes).
It's about time for some fartlek, I think. I've been running slow and easy a little too much lately. Thus, a little fartlek is just what the doctor ordered.
Fartlek, aka Speedplay, is a distance runner's training approach developed in the late 1930s by Swedish Olympian Gösta Holmér. In its widely adapted contemporary forms, fartlek training is alternating periods of faster and slower running, sometimes over natural terrain. It differs from traditional interval training by being less structured. To put it another way, traditional intervals can be thought of as speed work, whilst unstructured off-and-on speed running can be considered speed play, or fartlek.
After a mile of warmup, I let loose with the fartlek. Guess what? It all comes out pretty well. I run slow and slower, slow and slower, mixing it up. Others on the roads and sidewalks do not seem too offended. The entire ten-mile run winds up being just fine.
It's all very satisfying.
