Let’s just get the elephant out of the room. A fartlek has nothing to do with passing gas. Aren’t you glad I cleared the air? 😂🤣 #punintended

Fartlek is a Swedish term meaning “speed play”. It’s a type of speed workout that can easily be incorporated into any runner’s training plan.

Why should you do fartleks?

The purpose of a fartlek workout is to incorporate some speedwork into your training, especially early on in the training cycle. They are good for both beginners and experienced runners. They are less structured than intervals but lasts longer than strides. They should be done during base building or near the beginning of a training cycle when you are just getting used to picking up your pace over a longer distance. It’s a less structured way to practice leg turnover and building in some speed into your running without following a specific duration or needing to hit a specific pace. It’s a stress-free way to work in some speed.

How to do fartleks

The most popular way to do fartleks is to run fast from landmark to landmark, followed by recovery until the next landmark, and repeat. You can use any kind of landmark as your cue. One of the participants from my RRCA run coach training does “Trashcan Tuesdays” which is when they pick up the pace from garbage can to garbage can. Sounds pretty fun!

Here are some sample fartlek workouts but the possibilities are endless! Start with a 10-15 min warm-up, do the fartlek workout for 20-30 min and end with a 10-15 min cooldown.

Unstructured fartlek: Pick up your pace whenever you feel like it for however long you want (30 seconds to a few minutes) and slow down to your recovery pace until you feel like speeding up again.

Semi-structured fartlek: Pick a landmark in the distance (light post, mailbox, house, end of the street, stop sign, garbage can, etc) and run to it with a faster pace. Then slow down and recover until you reach another landmark and repeat.

Structured fartlek: Run a down ladder of 6-5-4-3-2-1 minutes at a faster pace with 1-2 min minutes of recovery in between.

If you are in the base building phase of your training or the first few weeks of your training plan, try to build in a fartlek workout. Just remember that fartleks are a type of speed workout and speed workouts should only be 20% of your overall mileage. So if you are running 3-5 times a week, you should only be doing 1-2 speed workouts each week.

Let me know how it goes!