Getting Over a Break in Training

Training is never perfect.

Today I'm sharing my own experience in getting over an unintentional break with training.

As I always like to say with my clients, life has it own plans. So despite your best intentions, life will throw at you challenges along the way to derail such plans.

When training towards a goal race or even when working towards general health and fitness, it isn't uncommon to experience a lull in activity.

Here are my favorite ways to get back to training and making it stick.

Just start.

There will never be the right time or the perfect time to get back to training. Stop waiting for your life situation to simply present you the best time to get running again.

You have to make time and make it all work.

Just recently I've gotten back to night running because it is the only time I can run. After putting my children to bed, I have a window of a few hours where I can go for a training run before bedtime.

Not ideal. But I make it work.

So don't wait for the right situation or timing to start. Make the time to go out on your first run back from your break. Life won't make the time to run for you.

Snowball your consistency.

To help prevent me from taking another break from running soon after I'm back again, I tell myself to slowly build up consistency.

This may mean that if I manage to only get one run in the week, I'll work to make sure I get at least one training run for the next week. And if I know that that next week will only allow me to run once, I'll make sure to make that sole run a little longer than the previous run.

From there I work to either increase my training duration or training frequency gradually. Or I could increase both!

This allows my body to progressively get back to the true training frequency my training plan demands. For me I need to be running at least 4 days a week.

Remind yourself of your goal race.

I want to run the Publix Atlanta Half-Marathon in February 2024.

Reminding myself of that goal race helps spur action to get going again. This is especially true since starting as early as possible will allow me adequate time to train and get better. Starting as soon as possible will also allow me some wiggle-room in training for unexpected life events.

If you're not training for a race, but instead run for general health and fitness, remind yourself of your big health goals. From there I'd recommend working towards an achievable short term goal, namely a goal at least 3 months away.

Creating a goal of total distance or total run duration is an easy short term goal to set.

Thank you for reading! Apologies for being out for the past few weeks. I hope you're having better luck than I am versus the cold viruses.

Happy running out there!