So it's been a while since I did a Fartlek run and since I have started regular runs again I have wanted to get back into the habit of mixing them up ! We know that works with overall fitness !
My VO2 Max suffered when I was leaving big gaps between my runs and then just running 5k's
this is something I wanted to recover before picking up the distances again .
I found a Fartlek run on the NRC APP so thought I would give it a go , it's just a 26 minute session so decided to try it out .
The run gets you running at various paces throughout the session and then settling back to a recovery pace in between , of course the faster the pace then the shorter the segment.
It's good fun albeit a little confusing at first .
It basically uses 4 paces
1 Recovery pace, 2. 10K pace, 3, 5K pace and 4, celebration pace (fastest)
It's tricky at first to know if your paces are right or not as the segments are quite short so not much time to settle in .
It was also quite breezy this morning so that didn't help.
I enjoyed the run and at times it was tough .
The only disappointment for me was my VO2 MAX remained the same but fitness age improved by 1 year !
Ahh well, here's to the next run 😁
Written by
Instructor57
Graduate10
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Well done, Ian! I would definitely struggle with those different paces, but it does sound fun. More structured than when I’ve tried to run Fartleks with just 2 different paces: running faster and slow jog 😊. I’ll have to look at that guided run.
Fastest pace 5:36, though!! Excellent.
Keep at it with mixing up the runs and I’m sure Garmin will give up in the end and will reward you by improving your scores 🤞😊
Thanks Julia , and yes, it's more structured then I'm used to when doing Fartkeks.Infact I rather like the less structured approach to be honest , but, it was something different !
The watch seems to average over several runs. And the internal value of VO₂Max seems not to be a whole number, and is rounded down for display. The fitness age is based on that internal number.
PS. After some investigation... this is indeed the case. Encoded in the data sent from the watch is a single number which is approximately a multiple of 0.00005 VO₂Max units.
My run yesterday had this number being 787132, which after decoding (multiply by 3.5 and divide by 65536) yields 42.04. My intervals run in Thursday decodes as 42.30 and my Jeffing run on Tuesday decodes as 42.44. Interesting!
You point it at a bunch of .FIT files copied out of the ACTIVITY folder on the watch and it generates a set of graphs, then launches the web browser to display them.
Wow, very well done! I would've been confused too, I still don't know what my 5k v 10k pace is 🤷♀️ but you enjoyed it and you've improved your fitness age yay! 😃💪👏👏👏
Well done Ian. It's good to mix it up a bit as we know. Mr Garmin is still fickle though.
A nice pace too - fastest starting with a 5!!!! 👏👏👏
I tried a similar NRC run but it was set intervals rather than fartleks. I must admit I struggled with getting the right pacing, and as you say it's not really long enough for each segment.
Thank you Diane , oh believe me the fastest interval was only a short one . But repeated 3x times if I remember correctly.I might try another Zombie run next 😁
I am good thanks. Completed my second run of week two today, which was all good. Went for a lovely walk in the park afterwards but overdid it with the walking and feeling very fatigued now !
This came up on my feed as I've just run this today Instructor57 . It isn't any easier in the 2 years since you did it and you got away lightly, my VO2 went down a point and I got 3 years older 😂😂😂
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Reducing pace
