This has been a rough week for training. Last Saturday was spent traveling to, attending, and returning from a memorial service. That ruled out a long run. Then RunnerGirl did her long run on Sunday, so my long run got moved to Monday. Tuesday was spent in meetings for school. I left from the meetings for a fantasy football draft in Jackson. That left no time for running on Tuesday. I got back so late on Tuesday that running Wednesday morning would have been counter-productive due to a lack of rest. I had meetings until 4:00 (of course, I couldn’t leave right at 4) again and had to be at Gazelle by 5. When the Gazelle training concluded at 9:15, I just wanted to crash. I did finally sneak a couple of miles in before school meetings resumed on Thursday morning, but it was pretty short.

I’ll grab some miles this weekend, but my training volume this week will be pretty low compared to my usual marathon-training load. I need to keep telling myself that THIS IS OKAY. I’m not going to lose my base or my endurance because of one weak week.

The urge of most runners when they miss a workout from their training plan or have an off week or over indulge at a potluck (I’m guilty of that one this week, too) is to cram a bunch of extra hard workouts in to make up for it. Unfortunately, this is counter productive. Cramming extra workouts in is a recipe for injury. If injured, more workouts will be missed. It’s a downward spiral I’m trying to avoid.

So, what do I do? I’ve been off my plan for about seven days now. I guess I should probably just resume my plan and forgot those missed days/workouts. I don’t think I’ve missed so much that my fitness has regressed, so I don’t think I need to go back and repeat any of the previous workout.

Mental preparation has probably taken the biggest hit. I was hoping to have a really solid workout week before the rigors of starting a new school year hit me. That didn’t happen, so now I need to block it out of my mind and move on.

I hope your training is going better. Also, I hope you’re planning on attending The Runners’ Book Club, Vol II. We’re reading My Life on the Run by Bart Yasso. We’ll be discussing it on October 6.