“Along the way, rejoice in the struggle. Embrace the tears. And celebrate the missteps. Because the true value of your life is found not in your accomplishments, but rather in the long, hard path trodden to achieve them. ” – Rich Roll

Without sounding overly juvenile, fartleks are fun. Saying fartleks, well, that IS more juvenile, but I digress.

Remember the games of your youth when you used to race your friends to that next lamp post? You’d run hard for a short burst, catch your breath, then blaze off again in another direction, towards another object, laughing and having fun? A fartlek is a lot like that. But like what happens frequently when adults try to copy fun kid things, this game got changed into something a little more mundane.

Fartlek – which is Swedish for ‘speed play’ – morphs the impromptu race into a structured lesson in learning to change speeds while running. In general, fartleks take place outdoors and involve objects like trees and signposts and bridges, where you briefly pick up your pace from where you are until you reach a randomly chosen object. Then you slow down to the pace you were running before. When you’ve recovered from that, you pick your next object and race towards it! It’s easy to inject fartleks into any regular run, making them more – dare I say – fun?

The lesson to take away from running fartleks is that you need to recruit different groups of muscles to change speeds quickly, especially for short bursts. Most of the time these are referred to as ‘fast-twitch’ muscles, while the muscles you use when you’re jogging easily are referred to as ‘slow-twitch’. To run faster you need to teach your body to call on these fast twitch muscles when you need them. Such as when you’re racing someone to get that last donut.

We’re going to teach you fartleks in a way that looks a lot like intervals, in that we’ll prescribe the amount of time you run with the amount of time you recover. Use today’s lesson to practice running one pace, then quickly picking up your pace and running hard, and then recovering. Even though this way of learning is more structured, don’t be afraid to throw some fartleks into your next easy run, especially if you’re with friends.

Ready. Set. Go! Last one to the lamp post buys the beer!