A friend of mine was recently on vacation in the Caribbean.
It was her first time there and she was having a great time with her spouse, enjoying all of beautiful scenery and people and food.
She was really having a great time.
Someone even invited them to come along on an all-day trip to a neighboring island – the others were going anyway and they had some extra room on the boat.
While she was excited, she also immediately got filled with a sense of anxiety.
You know, that tight feeling in the stomach and chest that just won’t go away.
Why?
It had nothing to do with the boat trip.
She loves to sail and has spent plenty of time on the water.
It wasn’t even about the people.
(She’s a much bigger social butterfly than me.)
Believe it or not, it was all about her training plan.
She was on this trip three weeks before a big race and she was supposed to do her long run on Sunday.
It was her longest long run before her race and she didn’t want to miss it and “throw away” all of her training.
And she’s far from alone. I get similar messages from people all the time.
“Hey, I’m taking a trip three weeks before my race. Is that going to screw up my training?”
No.
The answer is always, “no.”
For one, no single run is important enough to destroy your entire plan.
Your fitness is built upon weeks… months… even years of training and you’re not going to lose all of that by having to miss or modify a single training session.
Does that mean you’re going to hit your goals on race day if you just completely ignore your plan?
Probably not.
If you plan to push yourself and run a good race, you still have to train in a way that will lead to a good performance.
But a single session will not ruin your race.
I’ve had people miss their entire peak week due to the flu and they’ve still run really well.
But you also just can’t let a training plan control your life like that.
I understand these things are important.
I realize we set big goals and work hard to achieve them and the anxiety is completely normal – It just means you care.
But you also have to be able to live the rest of your life in a way that allows you to get the most out of it.
Which, of course (I hope), involves running and training.
But 9 times out of 10, it probably also means taking the spontaneous boat trip to the cool island that you’ll never be able to visit again.
For most of us, training isn’t about perfection.
It’s about progress.
And thankfully, progress doesn’t come from constantly tightening our control.
A lot of the time, it comes from the exact opposite.
Some of the biggest achievements in human history have come after periods of rest and flexibility.
If you learn to fit training around your life – instead of fitting your life around training – you’ll probably end up with even better results.
Learning to overcome the nerves and navigate through the anxiety is how you’re going to make progress.
Good training doesn’t just allow for some flexibility.
It requires it.