Wrenches…

One area that all runners have to deal with in their training and racing is unexpected changes or circumstances. If my warm-up routine gets changed because the parking logistics of the race are more challenging than I planned on, my first reaction is not to roll with it, it’s, “Crap. That messes up my plan.”

However, in a few cases where my pre-race plans have not gone exactly how I laid them out, things have still turned out well, or even better than I expected. Still, it takes some mental adjustment.

Since it’s impossible to control every circumstance out there (illness during training, bad traffic going to the race, etc.) it’s important to be prepared for the unexpected. How the heck can we do that? I don’t have a perfect answer but I have an idea I’m going to try out over the next few months.

For my training for the winter/early spring, I have a set number of miles I want to log per week and certain types of workouts I want to include. However, one day per week I’m doing a “Wild Card” and on that day, I’m going to blindly draw a workout from three or four different ones. All of them will be within the same type of difficulty. It might be five miles at an average pace, or a two-mile threshold, or a speed workout that has one-third to one-half the number of reps I would do for a full one. While I will have designed and picked the workouts that I’m choosing from, by not knowing exactly what I’ll do until the day of the workout, I think it will help acclimate my brain and body to unexpected race day or training surprises. A full evaluation to follow sometime later…