The Hill I Didn't Die On

I've been in a training funk lately.

Last week I had a workout on the schedule. I was supposed to do some hill sprints. My knees were a bit achy, and honestly I was feeling exhausted from both training hard and not sleeping. So I made the call, I wasn't going to do it.

Could I have done it? Yes.

Would it have served me? Definitely not.

Will skipping it make me slower? Maybe. Who knows. But that's not the point.

I want to keep loving this sport. Running has made me a better person. I’m more patient, more focused, and just generally a better wife and mother with running in my life. That's worth protecting. And the way I protect it is simple, even if it's not easy. I don't let myself get burned out.

If that means I lose some speed or fitness here and there, that's a trade I'll take every time. There's always space to get faster later. There is no guaranteed space to come back from burnout. 

Here's the thing I see all the time that I almost did to myself last week, runners treat the training plan like scripture. The workout is written down, so it must happen. Missing it feels like failure, even when your body is sending every signal that it's not ready.

But a training plan is a hypothesis, not a promise. It was written by you (or your coach) on a day when you didn't know exactly how this week would go, how much sleep you'd get, how stressed work would be, how your legs would actually feel on the day. When the plan and your body disagree, your body is the more current information.

Physiologically, pushing through that kind of fatigue doesn't just cost you one bad workout. That's how overtraining starts, with elevated resting heart rate, mood dips, nagging injuries that don't quite go away, and motivation that quietly drains out of a sport you used to love. None of that shows up on the day you skip the workout. It shows up weeks later, and by then it's a much bigger hole to climb out of.

Picture a runner describing what I felt last week. Capable, but resistant. Dreading it more than usual. I'd tell them what I told myself. That resistance is data. It doesn't mean quitting running. It means this session isn't the hill to die on.

Keep the big picture in mind. A slower week, or even a slower season, is recoverable. Losing your relationship with the sport altogether is a much longer road back.

-Eliana