What is Mona Fartlek?

The Mona Fartlek is a training session Australian long-distance runner Steve Monaghetti used throughout his career.

It’s a session that involves some hard fartlek running – perfect if you are short on time but need a good workout. The whole session can be done in under 20-30 minutes.

The session looks like this:

Warm up (~ 5 mins)
2 x 90 sec,
4 x 60 sec,
4 x 30 sec,
4 x 15 sec
Cool down (~5 mins)

Each interval has an equivalent recovery or slow jog period in between. ie: 90 seconds hard, 90 seconds recovery, 90 seconds hard, 90 seconds recovery, 60 seconds hard, 60 seconds recovery, 60 seconds hard, etc.

The recovery time in between can be as fast or slow as you like but your focus should be on running the interval sessions as quickly as possible while maintaining the pace throughout the interval. By the time you reach the 15 seconds intervals, you should feel pretty spent but should still aim to be running flat out.

If you are new to running you’ll find the session pretty challenging so you may want to do a shortened version until you feel more comfortable.

And don’t feel bad if you don’t reach 7km during the session!