The Mona

Running coaching tonight. The good old Mona Fartlek. Nothing like a Mona to get people hurting. Such a good hurt though. For those unfamiliar the Mona Fartlek is:

90 seconds on, 90 seconds float x 2
60 seconds on, 60 seconds float x 4
30 seconds on, 30 seconds float x 4
15 seconds on, 15 seconds float x 4

For those doing maths at home that adds up to 20 minutes of work. And boy is it work. The idea of the session is to do the 'on' pieces quicker than threshold pace. The float pieces are not easy or recovery, but rather they are done just a bit below threshold pace. All up you end up doing 20 minutes averaging about threshold pace, it ends up being pretty similar to a 5km time trial.

The group tonight did the Mona pretty well. Most of them have done it enough times now to have an idea of the pacing, the timings and how to go about the session, so it went pretty smoothly. Most of the group also have a good data set of previous Monas  to compare themselves too. As I often tell the squad, one of the real benefits of a set like the Mona Fartlek is that it is a great session for establishing a benchmark. You can do it, then repeat it after a couple of months of training and see if you improve. Like a time trial, it gives you a quantifiable way to track progress.

Mona Fartleks and other interval sessions like it are a great way to help drive performance improvement in running. A member of the squad tonight told me that she has friends who run heaps and are very fit, but are complaining that they don't get any quicker. She is trying to convince them to come and join our interval session. We know from the science that a very effective way to improve anaerobic threshold is to do work at or just below that threshold and increasing this threshold helps us go harder for longer, ie helps us get quicker. This is just what these sessions are intended to do. The session tonight was hard for sure, but little by little the people who joined the squad tonight will be seeing the benefits.