Running Tip: When LIFE f**** your training plan...

You've done your research.

You've poured over the data.

You've read all the articles and spent hours and hours sorting through all the blogs to find the perfect training plan to get you to your goal for that upcoming run you've dropped coin for six months from now.

You've got your nutrition plan in order and you're committed to following it religiously.

Your gear is battle tested and you're off.

Everything is going great and before you know it you're deep into your cycle and you've never felt more satisfied and simultaneously tired.  But you know you're going to kill your race day goals!

Then it happens.  Out of nowhere.

LIFE!

Be it family, the weather, your job, failed gear, sweet treats at the office forced upon you via celebratory event, even your own damned body (GI distress, a cold, injury, body chemistry change, or just a few days of emotional WTF), rarely will you get through an entire training plan without the stage left unexpected entrance of the character LIFE.

Too often we allow this random hurdle to force us into a guilt trip, forcing a methodology of keeping up with the "plan" we set out on.  We allow the "plan" to control us.  To manipulate our actions and to cause emotional distress when we can't keep up with the "plan" because of LIFE.

We lash out at others.  We hate the world because the world in all its complexities and nuances has it out for "us" and "us" alone.  Of all the billions of people on earth, LIFE likes to fuck with "me" and "me" alone.  Talk about a case of narcism we all tend to have from time to time.

Here's to rub.

We cling to the "plan" as if the "plan" is some guarantee of success on race day.   SPOILER: IT DOESN'T!

So what to do when LIFE comes along, like LIFE seems to always do within that six month, 18 week, 16 week, or 12 week training plan that you've bowed your head to in ultimate benevolence sacrificing all else and others in the name of the "plan"?

Well if the plan ain't working with the hurdles of LIFE, then change the fucking plan!

But isn't this sacrilege?  It's the "plan" for the name of all holiness!

NO!  EXCLAMATION POINT!  

The "plan" is nothing more than a starting point, that should be as flexible and adaptable as your daily, weekly, and monthly goals, challenges, changes, and physical and mental adaptions.  It is one of the many reasons coaches still exists in the face of the many "free" plans that can be found on the internet and within books.

For instance if your job switches your off day and requires you to work more hours, what do you do?

1. Quit your job to keep allegiance to the plan
2. Throw fellow employee under the bus to take on the tasks that you are supposed to take on to keep up with the plan
3. Fall mysteriously ill that prevents working extended hours, but allows you to continue adherence to the plan
4. Cry like a byotch about how life only has it out for you and you only and abandon the plan, become emotionally unhinged to self destruct the plan systematically
5. Begin providing excuses as to why you will never succeed at your goal, to establish a self fulfilling prophecy 
6. Run away from all your responsibilities and flee your home country to live off the grid in some remote mountainous area never to be heard from again

Hopefully none of these are an option, despite feeling as if they are all plausible alternatives.  Plans are an illusion of control, yet a necessary means to provide a form direction within the chaos known as LIFE.

When LIFE comes along, change up the game.  Change up the plan.  Become flexible and adaptable and find a way to adapt to the situation at hand.  In some cases that may mean abandoning the scheduled race entirely, but that doesn't mean you have to abandon you.

Switch to a maintenance plan.  One that maintains your fitness levels.  The gains that you made so that in the future you don't have to grow from the start.

I see so many runners who train up for a specific race only to throw it all away once the race is over.  Back to old habits and let their gains deteriorate into an abyss.  It is as if their only motivation to be healthy is for the training cycle in order to complete the race for the bling.

In short, they haven't transitioned to a life change for a better them.  They have adopted an appearance of a life change for a trinket hanging on the wall.

You see where this is going.  It has been said many times before.  The goal isn't the finish line of the race you've signed up for.  If that's the case, you should have stopped reading a long time ago.

The goal of any program may include meeting objectives that are centered around "peaking" at a specific point in time in the future, but should never be the "reason" for the fitness aspect of beginning a training plan.

Simply put, a training plan should only be a mechanism to take your fitness to another level on your journey to a better more physically fit you and has the capability to adapt and mold itself around the LIFE that you live and the changes that LIFE will bring with minimum disruption to what matters.  Your life.

Be good y'all, don't fret when life comes knocking.  Trust that Life will happen and adapt when Life comes along.  Even if you're mid-way through your plan.  Learn to be flexible and understand that LIFE isn't targeting you, it's testing your ability to change.