“So what should I do on days when it doesn’t feel good? Do I just go out and do the workout anyway?” asked one of my assistants as she looked at the Tough Mudder training plan on the spreadsheet before her. A simple and worthwhile question with about as complex an answer as you can get. Physically, if we had the answer, there would be far fewer injuries and many more elite athletes in the world today. Outside of the realm of competition, the same question is always present regarding our mental and emotional health. “Should I make myself go out and do something on bad days or is it better to just let it be a bad day and stay in?” Extrapolating from what I know about muscle recovery, immune responses, goal-setting, and acute vs. chronic repetitive-use injuries, I’d have to say that the best answer to both questions is “It depends.” Brilliant, right?
Running or completing a planned workout only on good days seems freeing and relaxing for a while. That’s the best part about a recovery or off season. No pressure. If you feel like it, do it. If not, no worries! Your body takes some healing time for all of those micro-tears and nagging not-quite-injuries. Your mind slowly (and sometimes painfully) readjusts to not relying constantly on the “runners high” after-effects to engage in normal, civilized conversation. Over time, though, the bar for “good days only” gets set higher and higher. Inversely, your body loses condition…you breathe harder, you feel weaker, it’s less fun, and it no longer feels like as “good” of a day. Except for a pre-determined season or period of time, “good days only” training usually ends up with fewer good days in the end.
So how do we decide on the bad days? Going out on bad days is clearly necessary to make more good days, but surely not all bad days are created equal. For me, the internal discussion usually starts with, “Why don’t you feel like it?” If the answer has to do with discomfort, the next question is whether I’m feeling legitimate pain or simply soreness.
Answer: Pain.
Verdict: Give that body part a break today, do something else if possible, re-evaluate tomorrow. You’ll feel stupid if you get really injured/sick because you were too damn stubborn to take one day off!
Answer: Sore.
Verdict: Get off your butt and do the workout. Do more yoga in your free time. Sore means you’re working something, dummy!
If the answer has more to do with motivation, a certain amount of self-bullying, coaching, and compromising comes into play. Everyone has their own strategies for getting out the door, but some of mine sound like, “If you get your least favorite workout done today, you won’t have to think about it for the rest of the week,” “Ok, so no sprints, what about hill repeats on the bike?” “No miles, no pizza, how do you really feel about that?” or the ever present, “You know you’ll be glad you did it later.” Usually, my self-discussion ends with either the planned workout or some sort of compromise (and yes, I’m almost always glad), but sometimes not…and sometimes I even eat the pizza/ice cream/burrito anyway.
I kind of like that philosophy in the rest of life, too. You can’t only be present on good days, otherwise they’ll become fewer and fewer. Sometimes you’ve got to force yourself out the door in order to pave the way for good days to come, even if it means a little compromise. If the risk of injury is too high, though, be at peace with giving one or more days of rest now to support your future health. And, every once in a while, just enjoy the pizza anyway and use it as fuel for next time.
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