It was dusk before I got started with today's Fartlek workout, but I did get out there. It was very humid and damp, but the temperature was a tolerable 75 or so. It got dark as I ran, but that's okay, too. Anyway, the prescribed workout was 20 minutes warmup/cooldown, with 10 x 2:00 fartlek accelerations in the middle, with 45 seconds rest between each pickup. Gilbert usually says that the accelerations should be somewhere between 10K and marathon race pace...faster than your recovery pace at any rate. I usually have done these pretty quickly.

So, I set my regular watch timers for the fartlek section, and set out. The warmup felt just great, and I was going easy, it felt like, about 9:30 pace for the 20 minute warmup. I was on a rolling neighborhood loop, and the 3 miles or so of Fartlek intervals were knocked off at an average pace of 8:08/mile, which is awfully quick, considering my current 8:00/mile 10K race pace. For the cooldown, I averaged a sedate 9:50/mile, as I just eased to the finish. I've got 1,000m repeats on the track tomorrow evening, so I didn't push the cooldown this time. The fartlek sections felt quick, but not too terrible. I was able to recover during the 45 second jog except for one that was uphill, so I count this as a really good workout. I did almost the full Saturday gazelle stretching routine tonight, just to help recovery, too.

Total mileage for the night, about 7.5 miles, overall average pace 9:00/mile. Tomorrow, the aforementioned 1000m track repeats with the afternoon Gazelles. It will be interesting to see how different they are.