Floating Day Off

For the last few weeks I have been thinking of the idea of having a ‘Floating Day Off’ from training.  In the past I would have a training plan and I would have to take a certain day off each week.  Generally it would happen before a long workout.  But as I’ve slowly learned that having a set day off for me doesn’t always work. 
 

You see I have a lot of irons in the fire.  If you’ve been reading this blog for a while you may have noticed the cute pictures of the kids that I post on here and their beautiful mother.  While those people love me very much and want me to succeed they don’t really care so much about me getting another PR.  They much rather have a good portion of my time.  In addition the family responsibility I do have to work for all of us to eat.  Not only do have my day job but my wife and I have a photography business and I spend a lot of time working on growing it.  And I haven’t even mention hanging out with friends, going movies, and so on…

It took me a long time to realize that the world doesn’t revolve around me.  Until I figured that out I would get really stressed out if I missed a workout.  Sometimes it would cause me to lose my motivation and miss future workouts.  I would get down on myself and think, “Man, I was doing so good.  I hadn’t missed a workout in weeks and now that I missed this key workout it has thrown off my whole training plan.  Now I won’t be as ready as I need to be for the race.” 

So now my training philosophy is this:  Each week on the front end I know what I want to do overall.  Example – I want to do a Long Run of X number of miles and I want to get in a Speed Workout and then a so many miles / hours of easy base miles.  So basically I have a general plan for the week but I don’t have the workout tied to any certain day. 

Why A Floating Day Off Works For Me:

1.        I don’t get stressed out if I miss a workout.  That then becomes my day off.  Sometimes things come up at work or home that I can’t control.  So, I just let it go.  Then I do my best the rest of the week to get the rest of the workouts in. 

2.       Weather.  I can’t control or predict if it is going to be raining, extremely hot or cold.  So, when it rains I use that as my off day for when I can’t get outside. 

3.       Most cookie cutter training plans that you find online don’t take into account that sometime you have to work on weekends.  Being a wedding photographer I don’t always have a Saturday to do long workouts.  Also my wife and family makes plans for the weekends I don’t always have time to go on long epic workouts.  So, I just adjust my training schedule to my work/ family schedule.  Recently I’ve had to get my long runs in on Fridays because my weekends were jam packed. 

4.       Sometimes I over sleep and miss the only opportunity to get a workout in.  I over sleep sometimes because I’m tired from training hard but most of the time it’s because I stayed up late the night before.   When that happenes I try to not let one mistake miss up my whole week of training.  By having a floating off day I can enjoy the extra sleep that I need and move on without wrecking my goals.

Bottom line is that a Floating Day Off = Happier Me.  This way of training helps me to juggle being a husband, dad, provider, and runner.