At Harwoods Mill, a place with 20+ miles of wide trails, the CNU distance group does a light fartlek. Four various fartleks on the day:

15x30s w/90s recovery

Patrick did a 15min WU and CD, and for the middle 30mins he did a 30s hard surge every two minutes. The focus with him is on getting him to be able to change paces.

4x(90-60-30-15s) w/equal rest

More of the long-distance group did this workout. This workout was taken from West Virginia's coach, Sean Cleary. You can watch his discussion of that workout (and an entire series of videos from a talk he gave) here. You do all four 90's, then all four 60's, then all four 30's, then all four 15's, each with equal rest after the rep. The workout portion is 26min in total, with only 13min hard.

4x(90-60-30s) cutdowns w/equal rest b/reps, and 2min extra b/sets

This workout is more about changing gears, and so I had the more middle distance group do this fartlek today. This workout you do the 90, then the 60, then the 30, each with equal rest afterward, and then take an additional 2min easy running between sets. So, each set looks like: 90on (90off) 60 (60) 30 (30 + 2min). However, each of the "on" sections are broken up into three equal parts:

90 - 30/30/30s at 10k/5k/3k pace

60 - 20/20/20s at 5k/3k/1500m pace

30 - 10/10/10s at 3k/1500m/800m pace

iPod Fartlek

Jade was given a fartlek on her iPod. I told her to make a playlist of about an hour and to put four "AWESOME" songs on it. Then, she was to put the playlist on shuffle and just go run. When one of those four "AWESOME" songs came on, she had to go hard. During all the other songs she was just to run steady. Didn't matter if the songs all came on in a row, were in the beginning, at the end, etc. I did have her warm up 10-12min before she started the playlist just so she wouldn't be starting on a hard. This workout was taken from my college coach, Rob Wood, who would give this workout to his high school group. I believe his version he would have them put 8-10 songs on, with half of them being "uptempo" songs and half being "slow" songs, and you just run your effort in line with the pace of the song. Generally this workout is very enjoyable, though he did cite one time a HS athlete of his came back upset, and after Rob asked him why, the kid responded, "Because all my slow songs played first!"