If you miss a day of running, don’t beat yourself up over it. Instead, focus on getting back into your running routine as soon as possible.
Start off slow, and gradually increase your intensity as you get back into your regular routine. Additionally, make sure you‘re eating a balanced diet and getting enough rest to support your running goals. Finally, consider trying a different running route or incorporating cross–training activities into your routine to help keep your motivation up.
Your training history, goals and why you missed training play a big role in how quickly you can get back to training. Here are some good guidelines for when you’re ready to return to training:
If you miss less than five days of training, assume you haven’t lost any fitness and your legs are responding to jumping. training very fast. You don’t want your first run to be a hard workout, so plan on two or three easy days at 80-90% of your normal easy distance. Incorporate explosive lunges or sprints that stimulate the central nervous system and prepare the legs for a more intense race. After two or three easy runs, you should be able to return to more challenging workouts without having to adjust your pace. After a minor injury or illness, take a few extra days to run easy before attempting more intense training.
Dealing with crashes when races were going so well
While we all love our dedicated race time, we can’t protect it 24/7 .
It is not our job and other aspects of life should come first.
How to successfully adapt your training to missed races
Like it or not, a lost race always affects our training, even if it’s just our mind game.
A lost race is not likely to cause you to lose any fitness or strength gained during exercise. It takes around 10 days of missed racing and training before you start to lose shape. This is good news! For those of us who panic when we have to lose an easy 3-mile run, knowing that it won’t affect our overall training will help put our minds at ease.
The Science of Detraining
I’d be missing something if I didn’t offer some quick tips on what a few rest days will do for your fitness. Finally, we’ll talk about what to do if you need to do some zero days instead of the vomit-inducing hill training you were planning to do. As a result of those missed days, you’re sure to take a monumental step back from the fitness you’ve worked so hard to achieve. Here’s a summary of the research: If you miss up to 7 days of exercise, there are no significant effects on fitness. Zero, zero, nothing. Sure, I can send someone into our physiology lab and measure that components of their physiology, like VO2max or stroke volume, dropped by 2.21% or some other insignificant amount. But some details of physiological deterioration do not always mean a decrease in performance. And the practical amount of fitness decline you get from missing up to a full week of training isn’t all that significant, especially if you look at it through a total training prism (more on that here). Keep this in mind when you catch a cold, and try to figure out when your first relapse will be. Be conservative, your physical condition probably won’t be affected at all.
Try to get back on your calendar as soon as possible.
Because we all know how quickly a day or two of inactivity can turn into a week, then two weeks, and then you get to a point where you’re completely unmotivated to start running again.
