Training, Interrupted

This is how it goes.

You plan your training for something--a 5K, a soccer tournament, a triathlon--and then life comes along instead. When you have family, jobs, other hobbies, yards, errands, events, sick kids or pets or gardens running amuck--life just interrupts your training all the time.

And you just get over it.

I didn't get my swim in on Wed or Thurs (I am swimming tonight pre-date night with my spouse). I took a day and a half off work to go with my dog to film a TV commerical (hint: not nearly as much fun as it sounds). On Wednesday night filming ran past 7 p.m. and we started again at 8 a.m. Thursday morning, and Thursday night I have agility class with my dog so the two days got away from me.

Now, I was already planning to take 2 days off a week (instead of just 1) through June and July in order to spend more time with my family and do some much neglected work around the house. I just didn't plan to take them two days in a row! I had planned Thursdays as my planned off day, with the second day being a bit of a floater as I saw how the week was going.

So I'm swimming tonight--a quick workout--and then a shower and off to dinner with my extremely patient spouse. Tomorrow a 60 minute run. Sunday a long bike followed by a 10 minute run. All will be well.

However, I want to point something about about training, interrupted. There is a difference--a HUGE difference--between postponing training because life gets in the way, and postponing training because you would just rather be doing something else. Exercising, to me, is like bathing. You need to do it regularly to make life work out right--you can get away with the occasional skipout, but if you do it too often, the consequences aren't necessarily enjoyable. You can't keep putting it off because other things need doing--believe me, there will ALWAYS be other things that need doing, and it's so easy to tell yourself that you will just work out tomorrow instead.

So you need to schedule your workouts like a haircut or a doctor's appointment or Lord help me, your daily shower. Put them on the calendar (my coach has me use Training Peaks--www.trainingpeaks.com--which is a great system to calendar your progress in workouts--it helps calculate mileage for you, which is always a terrible thing for my non mathematical mind). And then unless something really big comes up--and you will know what I mean when I say really big (needs to be more than there is just this great TV show I want to watch, but certainly you don't want to go jogging off for your run when your spouse is undergoing an emergency appendectomy---the truth lies somewhere in between), you gotta keep your appointments. Even if you don't feel like it.

On days that I really, really don't "feel like it," I tell myself this: get dressed, go out and and work out for 10 minutes. If you still hate it passionately after those 10 minutes, you have permission to quit. So far, I have never started a workout and stopped. I mean, you've gone to the trouble of getting dressed and out the door, and if you are like me, you won't want to waste all that effort just going back inside! (obviously, if you don't feel like it because you are truly sick, you need to take the day off and get well).

These type of mental games really work. Don't poo poo them. Your right and left brains don't always know what is going on between them, so fool them as much as you can.

Happy non-slacking!