It helps, I think, to have a day in which to anchor your training.
Everything else can be penciled in on the schedule, changeable as the wind, but having that one day at a specific time when you run—almost without fail, barring obligation or injury—it has been critical to my running journey.
For me, that’s a Sunday morning.
Eight thirty am. If I am not racing, travelling or sick, I am dressed and standing in the parking lot where I meet up with my running crew, ready to knock out a distance run.
Clockwork.
Sundays are my run days.
It’s a permanent event in our family calendar: Dad’s Sunday Run, it reads. And I don’t sleep in, I don’t shirk it, I don’t consider it an optional invite. It’s a memo to myself to get out of bed, get ready, and run some klicks.
Rain. Shine. Snow. Ice. Heat. Cold. Whatever.
Sunday morning is booked.
Doing it this way, having a locked-in slot for yourself for a weekly running date has been one of the best things that has kept me steady in this sport. I’m sure I could write something about taking the guesswork out of planning or some psychobabble about cognitive load and planning, but the simple heart of the matter is regularity and commitment.
You just show up. Over and over, week after week, and you don’t question it. It becomes habit. It becomes who you are. And while the world may spin and whirl and offer up opportunities for excuses, having one training run written in ink has kept me going for nearly twenty years through all of that.
Definitions
- klick
- As a Canadian I run in metric. As a writer, I find the word kilometre clunky and clinical. I'll usually use the colloquial "klick" or "klicks" to substitute in for this.
