What's wrong with doing an untimed, unstructured fartlek?

Nothing really. It's a lot like untimed and unstructured sex.

I don't think there's anything wrong with it.

Personally we did structured fartlek with my track team but as I learned to run by feel I found it to be very fun, a good base phase workout that doesn't really stress me out.

There was a Dellinger video where he said more experienced athletes got unstructured fartleks and inexperienced ones got structured ones, you get to a point where you know what you're doing and it provides the same benefit.

That too

I agree, no one is making anyone do a structured fartlek. In my opinion, at the beginning of summer, an unstructured fartlek is actually better than a structured fartlek. At the beginning of summer training, you don't want to include many workouts if any beyond progressions, aerobics, and strides. However, the unstructured fartlek provides a fun twist to the monotony of easy training. See a light pole? Run to it for 5k pace. There's no harm in it, it's less stressful than a structured fartlek, and it harkens back to its original meaning, speed play. Structured fartleks are better in the middle of base because it prepares you for your more serious workouts such as the lactate threshold run, tempo runs, and etc. The truly wonderful aspect of the fartlek is its ability to capture a wide variety of paces in one workout and in addition to this, develops your capabilities of learning to change paces on a dime.

Fartleks are good for injury-prone athletes who need to learn to tune into the feelings of their body during training. Harder to overtrain when you remove the "carrot" of "hitting splits".

Structure in a fartlek is imposed by coaches who want to make sure the athletes do enough variety, so that they don't just have an easy cruise. As others here stated, experienced athletes know how to constructively mix it up, without getting caught up in a bunch of little races with teammates, or just putting in miles, so no structure has to be imposed.

RyecorDone wrote:

Structure in a fartlek is imposed by coaches who want to make sure the athletes do enough variety, so that they don't just have an easy cruise. As others here stated, experienced athletes know how to constructively mix it up, without getting caught up in a bunch of little races with teammates, or just putting in miles, so no structure has to be imposed.

Interesting responses, can't say I disagree. I'm wondering if there's someone who does, or at least someone to present an opposing argument.

Here's another scenario -- instead of a fartlek, an athlete does long repeats on dirt, gravel, whatever, at 10K effort. Essentially for a college guy, XC race effort. They'll do a jog rest instead of standing, no pace goals, just effort. Does that athlete come out of the base phase a better runner?

I`LL TELL YOU WHY IT`S WRONG! fARTLEK is not EXACT! tHAT`S WHY!!!!

Yea, there are basically two definitions of fartlek that people use. One is what you described, un-structured speed play, pickups, etc. the other is a word for an interval workout based on. Time instead of distance , like 1 min on 1 min off stuff.

Do it however you like. I like to include a bit of walking between fast sections, because then I can do them faster without any extra stress. A 'speedplay' run can be done easy, moderate, or hard like a workout.

Our sport has a tendency to be very specific mainly because of how we communicate. The only way that I know how Seb Coe trained was a detailed book written by his coach. I have some notion of how NAU trains from training logs that have been posted here. We find successful things from other programs and our own and we label that information to be used or spread later.

Unstructured fartleks don't allow that.

I would be willing to bet that most coaches aren't entirely opposed to "unstructured fartleks." But they're harder to talk about. Someone say's, "yeah we just do some fartleks in the summer to tune up." Then there's a dozen follow up questions if they come from a successful program or if they just made a huge step. "How long are they usually?" "do you ever do them during a long run?" "Are they 5k effort or closer to tempo?" and on it goes.

We're analytical. If you found out that BYU made fartleks a staple this year when they took down NAU do you think we'd by okay with the idea that the distances, paces, recoveries, frequency, were all random for each kid on any given day?

When I communicate with my athletes it's easier to give parameters. I also have a better idea how that day is going to feel. I'm sometimes wrong, but I've done this long enough to be in the ballpark just about every time. I've had kids do progression runs where I left things pretty vague. Some treated it like a workout that I'm sure felt it for the next few days, others it was basically a run where someone was one stepping and the team pushed the pace. There's a right day for either of those, but in no situation are both perfect at the same time. The fix is to provide a little more scaffolding to the equation.

They can be used and they can be successful. It probably takes having a clear goal in mind from it and a solid understanding from the athlete of what kind of training is going to help them. I'd never recommend this to the kid that would take a day off if he didn't see an assignment for the day. I also wouldn't give it to the workout hero who doesn't know how to win this so he just murders him/herself. My kids that "get" it, they'd do great with an unstructured fartlek.

A relaxed answer.....what the great Woldemar Gerschler would have anwered ...." It`s not EXACT!!!!"")))

We had a fartlek workout in college where we ran a circuit in ear shot of the coach.

We'd run easy at first.

Then when he whistled, we'd pick up the pace until he whistled again.

And so for for a set total amount of time.

Very unstructured for the runner that didn't know when the pace was going to change.