UrbanUpdate

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Running can be pretty boring. You take the same damn route at the same damn pace three days a week, sweating through your ratty old Wilco t-shirt. It doesn’t have to be so tedious. To break out of the crushing monotony (and get a better workout while you’re at it), head to your local track.

"I think when you put some sort of structured workout into what you’re doing, it gives you more of a sense of purpose and a specific task to accomplish rather than saying, ’Let’s go out and just run 30 minutes,’" Dave Smith, Director of Track and Field and Cross Country at Oklahoma State University, tells us. You go to the gym to power through—or crush, insert your verb of choice here—reps on the bench press. Why not do the same with running?

You don’t need those ridiculous short shorts or neon-colored Nikes. You just have to find a local track, which is like a National Geographic special about the onset of mating season this time of year, crawling with athletes who haven’t seen skin since fall. (Pro tip: Try for a municipal park where the adults are; don’t be the creep who shows up at high-school girl’s track practice.)

Once you get to the oval, it’s just a matter of breaking up the workout properly. Rather than sprinting the last five minutes and collapsing in a puddle of vomit, spread the intensity throughout your workout. Smith is an advocate of a workout that alternates hard effort with a relad pace.

The workout itself is simple math: You want the fast part of your run to account for one third of the time. So if you’re running 30 minutes, you want 10 minutes to be all cranked up. Smith recommends running one minute hard, one minute easy. If you do a five-minute warm up on the front end and a relad five-minute cool down when you’re done, you’ll hit 30 minutes faster than you ever have before—and feel like you’ve actually done something.

Running faster will, well, make you faster. But this weekly workout—and we can’t stress enough that this is a once-a-week thing to break up the boredom of running—isn’t just to give you the edge against your cousin in the local 4th of July FREEDOM 5k. It’ll help you in your other endeavors, like getting an extra base in beer league softball. "It’s going to effect your overall fitness and honestly improve in how you can perform in any sporting events, whether it be weightlifting or playing basketball or tennis," Smith said. "Because you become more efficient at delivering oxygen to the working muscles."

So when go for your run after work Tuesday, take a left towards the track instead of following the same dull route you took last week. It’s still 30 minutes, but it’ll fly by.

Bill Bradley is a columnist at Next City. Follow him on Twitter @billbradley3.

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