Are you over-committing your future self? There’s this really annoying thing I do to myself all the time. I schedule a babysitter, or sign Will & Andrew up for a few hours of camp, and then I start day-dreaming about how I will use that time.
I’ll meal plan! Get ahead on the laundry! Do my running! Move a few boxes out of the basement and into the attic! Go to Whole Foods with no one screaming for a bagel! Read a couple chapters of that new book with coffee! Write a blog post! Go to spin class!
It’ll be SO AMAZING.
Except I’ve now day-dreamed about 5 hours worth of things I’d like to do with only 2 hours of time.
What really ends up happening is I empty the dishwasher and clean up from breakfast for half an hour, throw laundry in the washer, waste ten minutes on twitter, and then realize I only have an hour left and have to choose ONE thing to do.
Well, the same thing can happen to us when we look at training plans and schedule our running.
Will you be able to run when you think you will? When you’re looking at the plan online, it’s easy to think “I’ll get up early and run! I’ll run with the jogging stroller! I have the kids in preschool, so it’ll be easy to run then!”
When it actually comes time to do it, you realize that you’re exhausted and the last thing you want to do is get up at 5 a.m. and run, or your house is destroyed and you have no plans for lunch or dinner and you’ve got ten errands to run that’ll take you 1/16th of the time without kids, so no way are you running while they’re at preschool this morning.
This fall, I have Andrew in preschool for a few hours on Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings. It’s tempting to look at the calendar and think “Great! I’ll do all my running then!” But what about all those other things I’d like to do without kids? Am I going to spend all my free preschool time running? Better to schedule some of it with the jogging stroller, some with a babysitter, some on the weekend when the boys can have Daddy time.
The trick to determining a realistic training schedule: Think about your training schedule as though it’s present tense. Look at a week on the plan, and figure out how you would do it if it were THIS week. Would you get up tomorrow at 5 a.m. and run? No? Then why do you think you’ll be willing to do that in October when you’re penciling it in? Would you, if the kids were gone from 9-12, spend two hours of that running and half an hour stretching and showering? If you would, great, if not, then figure out what you need to do to make it realistic. Maybe you would spend that time running provided you didn’t have an empty fridge. Can you grocery shop in the evening when the kids are sleeping? In the early morning while your partner feeds them breakfast?
What can you do to shift your responsibilities around so that the time you’d idealistically spend running, you can REALISTICALLY spend running?
Keep track of the reasons you’re not running: It might help to come up with your plan for when you’re going to run, and then keep track of whether or not you actually when running, and if not, why. Then you can trouble shoot the reasons you’re not running. Were you too tired to get out of bed? Too sore from running back to back days? Too overwhelmed by household obligations like meals and laundry?
Maybe long run day is also “slow cooker” day, or maybe you need to get up an hour earlier every day in order to be able to fall asleep early enough to run early mornings on the days you want to. (Think of what you could accomplish in that hour on the days you don’t run!)
All right – you’re armed with a recipe for success.
I’ve got to run – my babysitter is only here for another two hours and I have to get 4 miles in, clean out our basement, fold two loads of laundry, clean out the refrigerator and send some e-mails.
(I much prefer them to destroy the house than each other!)
Good post! I’m creating a full marathon plan for next Fall, and thinking about the time/days I’ll be running. Most of it follows my half plan this year, but there’s some 9 and 10 mile runs thrown in during the middle of the week in those really high mileage weeks. I’m not sure how I’ll be getting those runs in! But I agree that it’s good to start thinking about it now and make a plan in advance that fits into my whole life schedule and not just my running schedule.