Track Tuesday: The Hunger Games Workout

You know the feeling of adrenaline you get when you’re being chased—how your heart’s pumping, and it feels like you can push yourself to new speeds? This Track Tuesday workout delivers that feeling at your next group workout. (You could try it alone, but you’ll end up hating yourself.)

The concept of the ‘Hunger Games’ session is to come up with a series of track intervals that suits the group, and then let the slowest person start first, followed by the next slowest, etc. The fastest person starts last.

The goal is for everyone to finish the interval at the same time: The faster people go even faster trying to catch everyone; the slower people go faster because they are being chased. It encourages each person to push themselves in different ways. Everyone wins!

Due to the adrenaline this workout tends to pump out, make sure you have a solid warm-up done before the intervals start. This is also the track session to break out the fast shoes if you are the competitive type.

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Hunger Games with Friends

The Warm-Up

Start warming up with a 10-minute jog, building from 4.5 mph to 6.0 mph.

The Workout

If you are familiar with running together as a group, you can figure out the starting order. If it’s people you don’t know, do one interval together and keep track of the difference in time between each person so you have a reasonable idea of the start order.

Select a number of intervals that take your fancy for the morning. Some ideas could be:

• Pyramid: 200, 400, 800, 1200, 800, 400, 200
• Ladder: 200, 400, 800, 1200, 1600 or the reverse

Start with the slowest runner and give the allotted time between each runner setting off.

Walk/jog 100 or 200 meters in between each interval for recovery

The Cool Down

Take the time to run a couple of laps afterward to bring the energy back down and regroup as friends.

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