ultrarunningmom

Life isn’t like high school— you can’t make up the work. There’s really no credit recovery system in place. And there isn’t extra credit. Sorry.

This is why it is so important to catch waning motivation early, injuries, overtraining, and even boredom. When you miss a training session, sleep, or a meal (among other things in everyday life outside of training), you can’t go back and insert it. Your body just doesn’t work that way.

So what do you do if you miss a critical training session or don’t sleep well the days coming into a race? You press reset and move forward. Don’t look back and for god’s sake don’t try to “make it up” or get “extra credit.” The only thing you will get for your efforts is less. You’ll deplete your body and it won’t be ready for the next session, if you try to throw in an extra workout. You also run the risk of an unnecessary muscle strain or similar minor injury, especially, if you are a beginning runner or not used to doing two a day workouts.

Sleep—that precious recovery time a body needs (and my mind despises). If you lose it, it really is gone. Harvard Medical School actually did a study on this very issue click here for the study. The sleep foundation summed up the findings, “Even when you sleep an extra ten hours to compensate for sleeping only six hours a night for up to two weeks, your reaction times and ability to focus is worse than if you had pulled and all-nighter.”

Making up calories doesn’t sound reasonable to me unless you are trying to gain weight. If you’re maintaining or losing it’s counterproductive. Over eating at a meal, isn’t good for you. It can make you feel hungrier the next day, which sets you up for eating more the next day too. You eat to fuel your body when it needs fuel. You don’t overeat to replenish your body’s energy supply for work you did the day before.

So if you miss a training session, a meal, or sleep, move forward. Don’t criticize or berate yourself either, that doesn’t help anyone and can lead to less motivation and progress. Press reset and move on.