Rail Trail Workouts: Taking Advantage of a Flat Path Near You
by GRP biathlete Luke Brown
I was recently running along the Erie Canal towpath outside of Syracuse, New York when a deep appreciation of long flat trails welled up in my heart. Now, this feeling didn’t happen spontaneously and many of you might not be able to identify with it, but for this midwesterner, 30 years of using flat bike trails, rail trails, towpaths, and more makes me sentimental for this type of path.
So, as a runner, how can you best take advantage of a flat trail? It of course depends on what you’re training for and what your fitness is like, and it of course can take creativity to avoid boredom, but here are 3 different workouts you can do to soak up a flat path near you.
Speed workout - fartleks
Fartlek means “speed play” in Swedish and can be used to mean many different specific workouts in the running world but in general, it is used to mean varied lengths of on-time followed by an active recovery time. This type of “play” can be helpful to not get too bored on a flat trail.
Suggestions for structuring a fartlek workout:
1) Pick a landmark you see up ahead and run fast to it, then jog your recovery until a new landmark, then pick another one and run fast to it. Keep going until you want to stop! Or until just after you’d like to stop. A landmark could be a tree, a bridge, a post, a shrub, or a turtle.
2) Join up with a few friends, start running, and then in a predetermined order, each person gets to lead an interval, choosing when to start and when to stop that interval within certain parameters - often being that the on-time needs to be between 1 and 3 minutes and the rest time between 1 and 2 minutes. The group keeps jogging during the rest time. It’s up to the current leader whether or not they’ll give the others a heads up when beginning their interval or they can simply opt for the surprise of just starting to run fast, keeping everyone on their toes!
3) Get one other friend and a bike. One person bikes up ahead, choosing when to hop off, drop the bike, and start running. The person who started running gets to the abandoned bike, hops on, catches the person who is now running, passes them and then chooses when to next drop the bike. Alternate this pattern for a set amount of time. Try 2 sets of 10 minutes to start.
Distance workout
If you’re a rail trail fan like me, maybe you can just grind out a long run on a monotonous flat path. Go ahead! If not, try getting creative like running to a point of interest along the trail, like a coffee shop where you can get a treat and have someone pick you up. Or run to a lake or creek where you can finish with a swim. Alternatively, if you can figure out the logistics, combine your run with a bike ride to cover more distance and see more sights (or even just more forest and dirt if there’s not much around). You can also try to make up songs or build a fictional story together with your running buddy by alternating sentences. Maybe the boredom of a towpath will actually show you the power of your mind! If that’s not a midwestern attitude I don’t know what is.
Progression run
This might be my favorite - a run in which you get faster and faster throughout the workout. Oftentimes these types of trails will have mile or half mile markers so you can have a more old fashioned way of telling when to pick up your pace, which often makes me feel more connected to the history of whatever path I’m on. There are so many ways to actually implement a progression run - pace, how fast you cut down that pace, how long you run before you start your progression, etc… but here’s an example. Start with a 10 minute warm up at an easy pace. Then start your progression run at 10 seconds/mile over your threshold or tempo pace. Every half mile cut down your pace/mile by 5 seconds. Do this for 2-5 miles. I really like the feeling of letting the speed build as I loosen up and just being able to roll along a flat trail, building momentum, and then finding a little fight within myself at the end.
I hope you can use these ideas to try something new, embracing whatever flat trail is near you. Enjoy!