Fartlek and Christmas Lights

This week has brought true cold weather running. Now the long underwear makes sense. On Tuesday morning I ran to Frederica's for our 6:15 start. It was about -9 but there was very little wind so it was a pleasant run, even along Dow's Lake. We ran to the Bronson Bridge and back, so for me that was 6K, but not really tempo. (Tempo is a faster than average training pace but not quite race pace.) I found it really hard to get myself out of bed at 5:30 but I was glad I did because I had a great run and gained some energy to accomplish what I had to that Tuesday. I even made it back to my core class at lunchtime. Because of work commitments, including our trip to Toronto, I had missed the last three classes. I'm really feeling my core muscles today.
Last night I went with Peter to the Wednesday night run club at The Running Room. Lately, on Wednesdays, I never know who I'll be running with because so many of my running buddies are doing hill training. I'm not doing hills until I have to! (Really not a big fan of hill training.) It turned out that Adrienne and Kevin, who are training for the Disney marathon, are finished with hills and ready for speedwork. Dwayne suggested they do a 10K fartlek, which was great for me, because I was planning on a 10K and now I had someone to run with. "Fartlek" is a swedish term which relates to speed. A fartlek, in running terms, means to randomly mix up the speed of your training run, incorporating short bursts of intense speed with medium and slow paces. The idea is not to time it too precisely but vary the intensity in a really random way. We did a warm up to Pretoria bridge and then began changing the pace. Kevin called out the speed changes every time we had passed two streetlights. When we moved from streetlights to canal lights, he changed the pattern, and since these were also closer to each other the timing changed. We were headed to Parliament Hill so that we could see the NCC christmas lights. The show of lights began when we reached the NAC. (We were on Colonel By so we could see across the canal to Confederation Park.) Kevin kept calling out the speed changes as we wound our way up to Parliament Hill and did the loop from East Block, past the Centre Block, past West Block, to the flame, and back down to Wellington. The lights were stunning, although I think my favourite colour combination is around the War Memorial. We ran down Elgin and through Confederation Park, and then past City Hall, back to the driveway. We had changed our fartlek by then to 10 minutes of medium running, and then one mnute of speed. The ten minute interval proved to be too long, so we switched to taking turns pointing out landmarks and speed. For instance, at that large skinny pine, we'll switch to fast, then at the Ritz we'll go slow. You get the idea. We ended with a fast sprint from Lansdowne at Bank back to the store. That was my first true fartlek. It was a lot of fun, and although the speed bursts were intense, it made for a quick 10K. At first, Adrienne and I found the slower recovery components hard to do. As Adrienne says, it's hard to switch gears, but as the run went on, I was appreciating and taking full advantage of each chance to recover.
So a beautiful night, although cold, a new training experience, and the magic of the Christmas lights downtown. It just reminds me that it's worth talking yourself into bundling up and going out into the cold. It's always worth it.