Life Happens. Keep Moving.

Racing season is here!!!

So one principle I work to help my clients understand is that life happens.

The greatest training program in the world can only happen when the rest of your life obligations are moving all in sync.

I'd like to address a common misconception right now when it comes to training.

There is no such thing as a "make up" run.

If you miss a training run, you miss the training run.

Assuming the missed run is a one-off, there are small adjustments you can make to your training plan to make sure you are progressing to your ultimate goal.

In training there are three types of runs: easy day mileage run, session run, or long run.

Here are some adjustments you can make if you miss any of those training runs. I'm presenting them in order of easiest adjustment to most difficulty adjustment to training.

Missing an easy day

If you miss an easy day mileage run, you could adjust the remaining runs for the week to get back some of that miss mileage. But you don't have to completely make up the missed mileage.

For example, if you missed a 5 miler easy run, you could add another mile to one run, and another mile to another run.

Missing a long run

If you miss a long run, there isn't much you can do to adjust your training week. Nothing can really replace the stimulus and training you get from your long run day.

Keeping on with your training week and make sure to get after your next long run.

Missing a session run

If you miss a session run, you missed an opportunity to fine tune your running at high speeds and intensity. Session runs are your only opportunity to do this kind of training outside of the actual race intensity.

So as you can see missing this kind of run is likely the most detrimental to your training.

If there is still space in your training week, simply move the session run to another day.

The problem with this is that it will affect the quality and timing of all the other runs afterwards - you have to take into account the recovery from the hard work outs!

Let's look at an example training week:

• Monday: 2 miles easy
• Tuesday: 15min easy, 200m repeats and 200m recovery x 4, 20min cooldown (session run 1)
• Wednesday: Unavailable to training, rest day
• Thursday: 2 miles easy
• Friday: 15min easy, 20s hard, 2 min easy x 4, 20min cooldown (session run 2)
• Saturday: 50min long run
• Sunday: Unavailable to training, rest day

If you missed Tuesday, you can see that there isn't much slack in your training week to move that session to another day.

You could possibly move the session run 1 to Thursday in lieu of the 2miles easy, but that would mean a back to back day of intense runs. Doing so may need an adjustment to the Friday session parameters too.

Thankfully, on Saturday the long run needs to be done at an easy pace.

When working with clients, these are the types of adjustments I'm open and ready to help with.

I am always making sure that any training prescription or adjustments help the runner move a little bit closer to their ultimate race goal.

Thank you for reading, and happy running out there!