Moose Fartlek
After the previous post, I was reminded that I had been meaning to look up the definition of a “Moose Fartlek”, a running workout I assume was made up by Julian “Moose” Spence of the Inside Running Podcast. A quick search spotted it in episode 223, I am mostly copying it here for my own future reference. A lot of this post is notes from listening to that part of the episode. Go listen to the source if you are interested.
The Goods
- 30 minutes total running, non-stop
- Five sets of six minute blocks, where a six minute block consists of
- Three minutes at 10k to half marathon effort
- One minute jog
- One minute at 5k effort
- One minute jog
Notes From the Episode
- If you need to build up to it, start with 3 or 4 sets. Can also make the three minute block be two minutes, or do just 30 seconds at 5k effort. Tinker with amount or length, not with effort.
- My own note for the 10k to half marathon effort: these are fast people, their half marathon is under 1h10 at the time of this podcast. For the rest of us, maybe use time-based instead. Something like race pace if you would be racing for 30 to 60 minutes. Moose adds that he thinks of them as “feeling a bit harder than threshold”. I assume that that is like Jack Daniel’s “Threshold” workout, which is a one hour race effort. Similar remark for the 5k pace, for them that is a 15 minute effort if that. If you have a 30 minute 5k, maybe reconsider the pace you are aiming for.
- Also on pace, aim for that 1h effort originally, can always build up to closer to 10k after giving the workout a try a few times. Or if feeling very confident, during the workout.
- The three minute blocks should not be that difficult. It’s not too hard, but enough to feel tough after the fifth rep of it.
- The 5k effort is about changing gears, faster leg turnover, heartrate spike, get that lactate going.
- Ensure a difference between the 3 minute effort and the 5k effort. First should feel medium, second should feel hard.
- Jogs are not floating, not supposed to be fast, not a walk either. At the start they might be 45 seconds per km slower than the three minute effort. By the end, that might be 1–2 minutes slower. Try to get the heart rate down in that one minute. The jog after the 5k effort will likely be a lot slower than the first jog. You will need it.
- Try to do by feel. Don’t show pace on your watch. You don’t need heart rate either, the intervals are small.
- It’s some threshold running (15 minutes total), mixed in with some VO2max (5 minutes total).
- Don’t let the 5k speed tempt you into flying into the next three minute block.
- Last sets should match the first sets, don’t start too hard, don’t finish too hard.
- Should get to halfway feeling pretty good, doesn’t normally get hard until fourth or fifth set.
- Put a recovery day before and after.
- Week out from a race, stick to three sets.
Trying It Out
After looking up the definition, I figured I should actually give it a try before publishing this post. It had also snowed again and I did not trust the local running track to be clear for my originally planned track workout. The rail trail in the area, however, does seem to get cleaned almost immediately and is a good candidate for a time and feel based workout. So I put the workout in my watch and gave it a go. For presentation purposes, I give the reps a name (LT = Lactate Threshold = that one hour effort, VO2max = something around 3–5k race pace, here 5k) I am used to and removed the jogs.
| Set | What | Lap km | Lap min/km | Lap Max HR |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | LT | 0.77 | 3:53 | 148 |
| 1 | VO2max | 0.29 | 3:29 | 155 |
| 2 | LT | 0.76 | 3:58 | 153 |
| 2 | VO2max | 0.27 | 3:41 | 154 |
| 3 | LT | 0.80 | 3:46 | 156 |
| 3 | VO2max | 0.28 | 3:34 | 155 |
| 4 | LT | 0.78 | 3:50 | 158 |
| 4 | VO2max | 0.28 | 3:31 | 159 |
| 5 | LT | 0.80 | 3:46 | 159 |
| 5 | VO2max | 0.29 | 3:25 | 158 |
All jogs were give or take 200m on the GPS. Largely 4:40 to 5:00 per km pace, so in the normal run territory. Nothing like the shuffle I have between reps in a track workout.
The goal I had in my head beforehand was 3:45/km for the three minute blocks and 3:25–3:30/km for 5k, based on eyeballing JD’s conversion chart. In the first set I glanced at my watch rather often, I wanted to get the right feel going for the workout. I also definitely did not want to way overdo it as scheduling constraints meant I would be doing a long run two days after this workout. After that I tried to focus more on the feeling, only glancing at my watch from time to time for a bit of confirmation.
Quite some of the reps are actually slower than I thought they would turn out to be based on the watch glancing. It is what it is. It was supposed to be feel based, so this is something that can improve over time. That said, as suggested during the episode’s discussion, I did not start feeling a little tired till the last two sets. Never had that feeling of “come on let it be over” though. The short reps probably helped, the slightly slower pace maybe did too. I should note the weather was also great at 5C, no sun, no wind. I added the peak HR of every lap in the table above. Due to the short reps, I don’t know whether anything can be concluded from it, but it still stood out to me that it never went that high. Top end of my GA range is maybe 155.
Next day felt nothing, so it was light enough on the legs, at least the way that I ended up doing it. If I did it again I would probably try to be a little bit faster for both on reps. I wish I had given this a try earlier on in this winter, then I would have had a better alternative than the workout I did the other week on a badly cleaned lane of a snowed in track. Anyway, I will probably try this one again at some point. Just need to see when I want to fit it in.
Where To Find the Explanation
As mentioned, it was in episode 223. In particular I found it at
timestamps 1:02:50 through 1:13:20 in that episode.
I did not actually relisten to it, I extracted the relevant block with ffmpeg
and had it transcribed by a machine learning tool. I wanted to skim through it
and jump back and forth. Text is better for that. I am adding the transcription
here, with some corrections by myself.
Moose you wanted to bring a session to the show this week and obviously to stroke your own ego, you’ve picked a session that’s named after yourself.
Well, I actually before I get into it, I just I think people need to understand the relationship between work and rest and volume and duration a lot better with their when with their workouts. And I think this sort of series talking about different workouts and how you might go about changing them to to specific purposes might might help that because a lot of the time I see people doing workouts like let’s just say 6 by a K at a certain like and 60 seconds off they won’t know what effort to go at and so they just go really hard and smash themselves or then they might do 8 by a K with like it they don’t understand the difference in the like how how all the those different variables within a workout are connected. So I think if we go through a series of them, then they might start be able to plan their own training a lot better.
So the first one is, it’s called the moose fartlek. Not sure who came up with this name, but brilliant, because it is a brilliant workout. So 30 minutes total running. It’s a workout that can be done for someone training for all distances. I feel like it’s nice to throw into a marathon block and it’s also nice as a sort of aerobic workout for a 5k like in a 5k block as well. So the 30 minutes is broken up into five sets of six minutes blocks run continuously. So, it’s non-stop running for 30 minutes and it’s organized like this. Five sets of three minutes at 10k to half marathon effort, one minute jog, then one minute at 5k effort with one minute jog. And so the jogs, they’re not, it’s not floating. It’s not supposed to be fast. It’s not a walk. It’s somewhere in the middle if that makes sense. So at the start you might find that you’re running about oh I’m going to say 45 seconds slower per k than your 3 minute effort for the jog, but that might end up being a minute to two minutes slower by the time that you’re finishing the workout, especially if you’ve gone a bit harder
and understanding that that pace might not be super accurate because it’s only a one minute
like it’s only measuring minutes. Yeah.
And it and it doesn’t matter really like as long as you’re trying to recover and get the heart rate down in that one minute.
Yeah. The idea behind this whole workout is you don’t have pace showing on your watch.
It’s run to feel. You don’t even need heart rate showing because the intervals are quite small that I actually just run this one all to feel. So it’s 3 minutes at your 10k to half marathon effort, one minute easy, one minute 5k effort, one minute jog. So the three minute reps are just under threshold. Like when I say just under threshold, I mean just over just over threshold in terms of it’s feeling a bit harder than your threshold. runs. We’re after a sort of, we want you to get in the rhythm. 3 minutes at that shouldn’t be that difficult. It’s not too hard, but it’s enough to feel tough after the fifth rep of it. So, you shouldn’t go chasing the feel of of being cooked at the end of these three minute reps. And then obviously the jog. Then the 5k effort is about changing gears. So, we want to spike the heart rate. We want to get the legs turned over into that faster cadence, quicker ground contact time, like a bit more power. We want to flood the blood with lactate and then that one minute jog after the 5k effort is probably going to be a lot slower than the one minute jog after the three minute effort because you’ll need it. And then you come off that jog back into that steady run again. So it’s sort of cycles through a few gears in this workout. You get a bit of a bang for your buck. You get some threshold running. You get some VO2max stuff as well.
And is it fair to say, Moose, when you go back to that three minute effort, you should almost feel like your brakes are on. Like you shouldn’t be working to hit that effort. It should be like, okay, I’m comfortable here. You’re still working, but you’re comfortable because you’ve just come off that much stronger one minute rep.
Yeah. I want to see a decent difference between the 5k, between the one minute and the three minute. So, for instance, if I go out there, if I went out and did this tomorrow, I would do the three minutes at I would hope to see that it would come out about 3:15s and then the one minutes would be at about 3 minute pace. So, about 15 seconds for me. But it like to reiterate, it’s not about pace. There has to be a real change in feel. It has to feel medium and then it has to feel hard.
Hey Moose, I got a similar question to what Brady asked because I know every time I’ve given these type of sessions to people because you run one minute a lot faster than that 3 minute and then you have a minute recovery. The temptation or you know you go out then to start that next 3 minute rep and that first minute is significantly that first minute of that 3 minutes sometimes is significantly faster because it feels easy after you’ve done that 5k effort. So like how do you I guess make sure that you don’t cook it early. that that three minute rep coming off the quicker 5k effort.
Yeah, I think you’ve just got to be comfortable with it not being as hard
and you’ve got to be patient and be a bit more disciplined there. It’s again another thing that we practice when we train is being disciplined and understanding pacing especially early in a rep. So you might do this session a couple of times before you get it right. And then the one I often find the one minute effort I go too hard because I feel like I’m let off the leash a little bit and so instead of running 5k effort, I end up running like 3k or 1500 minute meter effort and I ruin the session that way
because then minutes a minutes they’re not long enough to even to recover before going back into a three minute.
That’s it. Yeah, you and so it does take a little bit to get right, but 30 minutes isn’t that long. And especially like you should get to you could do this out and back and You should get to halfway with this feeling pretty good. It doesn’t normally get hard until like the fifth or fifth fourth or fifth set.
Yeah. And I think it’s sometimes good there like planning to get back further than what you went out. We’ve gone all out at the end there. Like I’ve made the mistake before where I’ve just got one of mine up here where we’ve kind of hit 2:50 pace for the first minute, but then by the last one we’re hitting 2:30 pace for the last minute because we’re like one more minute to go. Let’s just full gas it. That’s not what you want to do. You should be able to mash the last 1 minute.
Classic classic trail for 2:30
2:31 pace. Yeah, we did we done 390 m in the last minute.
Straight road, too. No GPS bullshit there, fellas. We did 9.3K. Anyone beat that? I’ll give you a Patreon subscription.
So, no, I wasn’t finished. Can I continue? Sorry. The trap then is then I would pick another location to do the out and back. So, you don’t want to go, “Oh, last time I did this, I got to that driveway in 15 minutes. This time I’m going to fang it and get you know, 200 m past that driveway. No, no. Then you don’t want to become obsessive with it because then even though you might not be looking at your paces, you know where about you are on the road and you’re going to turn that session into a bit of a race.
Yep, that’s a good point.
Moose, have you often like cuz like 30 minutes is like quite a long session for some people. Have you slowly like built this up in people’s programs where initially they might do three sets of it, then four, then five?
Yeah. Yeah, I have.
Start with three normally Build into it or even start instead of going three minutes I’ll go like two minutes one minute jog and I might even just do like 30 seconds at 5k effort as well just so the volume is down I still keep the effort levels the same like I don’t change that I either just change the amount of reps or the duration of each rep
yeah I actually also don’t mind doing three sets maybe like a week out from a race. Like if you just want to keep in tune with two different paces without like everything being hard or everything being a bit too easy, it’s a nice 18minute workout.
Yep. It’s good for that too.
Yeah, it’s it’s got a lot of flexibility this workout.
And I would I know you said like that 3 minutes you’ve got in the notes here like a 10k to half marathon pace. The first time people are doing it, it’s better to just hit that half marathon effort or pace instead of jumping straight into 10k effort or pace because that might you might not have a positive experience. in the first time. Get one on the board first and then maybe see how that pace felt and it adjust the next time you do it.
Yeah. Yeah. Or even do the first two reps at half marathon effort and then you can start to to drop it down.
I’m going to say I’m going to keep saying effort here because Sorry. Yeah. I was This one’s all about effort. Yeah.
And ideally in your week, of course, you wouldn’t do this workout the day after or the day before another workout’s planned. Like you’d follow this with a recovery day. You’d have a recovery day before hitting it fresher.
Yeah. At least one recovery day. Like we believe in two workouts a week with a long run. And so say you do this on a Wednesday morning, then you’ll have Thursday off, maybe Friday off as well. Not off, but just easy. And then then you’ll do a workout Saturday.
That was good fellas. I enjoyed that.