Friday Tri: Rules to Break

1. Schedule each day

When you are first starting an exercise plan, it's great to have a schedule so that you can see your progress day by day and also so that you have accountability, if to no one else, then to yourself. But I have found that the returns on having a schedule can diminish as time goes on. For me, I find it difficult to sleep at night if I am thinking about a difficult workout the next day, which is counterproductive, of course, but still happens. The only way around this for me has been to simply live an unscheduled life. I may not be progressing as fast as I could be theoretically if I scheduled well or had a coach, but in terms of living a normal life, I've had to do this. It forces me to listen to my body. Some days I wake up and am still unexpectedly sore from a strength training workout, and I adjust my workout either in time or in intensity because of that. Other times, I simply have too much on my plate in terms of family life and a workout has to give. So while I think it's a good idea to workout every day, there are limits to this rule.

2. Intervals every week

When I was doing hard core running workouts in preparation for an important marathon four years ago, I did intervals every week. I also did a tempo run every week. I don't know if it was the fault of the plan I was using, but I ended up getting injured and I have done less and less interval training ever since then. I tend to do more tempo-like training, and just never push myself past that pace. It has been working for me, so I am going to start recommending it to older athletes (over 40). I've heard increasingly that it is very common for older athletes to need more recovery time than younger ones. It doesn't even necessarily mean that you are getting slower, though that may happen. I am still getting faster than I was 8 years ago, which is cool. But I do it by doing smarter training like trying to run the actual course or something like it and overshooting race distance in preparation. The intervals have fallen by the wayside. Which doesn't make me too sad, since I was always more of a distance girl and intervals make me want to puke.

3. Gather information

My first year of training, I had no information. I just went out running or biking and had only a vague idea of how far I had gone. Then I stepped up and bought myself a heart rate monitor. I liked that so much my husband bought me a GPS watch, which I used obsessively for a year or so. And then I realized that the equipment was interfering in my enjoyment of the sport as well as in my ability to focus on my own body's signals as to when it was time to slow down or stop. So I put away first the GPS (my husband, who is not so OCD was happy to take it over), and then I even gave up my heart rate monitor except for every occasional uses when I am trying to compare data from previous years or when I am doing a race where I am trying to keep my heart rate really low for endurance. I still keep careful logs of all my workouts. Don't get me wrong. I'm still OCD about it. But my forcing myself to go without certain data, I tend to write down more information about how I FEEL about a workout rather than what the data tells me objectively is true about a workout. Yes, I'm still indoors and on a treadmill or an indoor bike most of the time, so I can still have lots of control over my terrain, but still, it's a step in the right direction for me. More information is not always better.