“Lazy people do a little work and think they should be winning. Winners work as hard as possible and still worry if they’re being lazy.” – Lewis Caralla
Good days and bad days are part of the training cycle. Your body will not always perform the way you hope it does, other times it’ll surprise you and perform better than you expected. Often there’s a lesson, but either way, take the lesson and move on. Tomorrow is another day, make the most of it.
Bad Days
Regardless of your experience as a runner, you will have bad days. There’ll be days you try to get out and run and can immediately tell something is off. There are days you won’t even get out to run because something isn’t right. Many of these days, you may not even know what’s causing it. It’s important to understand that this is just part of the process. Do the best you can that day, then show up the next day and hope for a better day, more than likely it will be. After a while you may see some trends based on things that are happening at work, things you eat or other things going on in your life. Make note of these and experiment with them so you can better learn to eliminate them and/or how to work around them. Sometimes you won’t be able to identify a cause, that’s okay too.
Good Days
Somedays you’ll get out and feel like everything is clicking perfectly. These are great experiences, they’re the days you remember why you started, you’re excited to be out running and you look forward to the next. A lot of times, you won’t know exactly why this happened, if you can, try to identify contributing factors so you can learn to add more and/or how to make the most of them. Exactly the opposite of the bad days.
For me, running the Mesa Half Marathon in 3:38 almost 2 years ago was one of these. It tricked me into thinking a 6:30 marathon was much closer than I thought and ultimately encouraged me to sign up for the Marine Corps Marathon. Long story short, my run at the Marine Corps Marathon did not go as planned.
Don’t Let Either Go To Your Head
Bad days and good days are part of the process, it’s important that you accept and acknowledge them as they happen, but do not let either go to your head. Letting a bad day go to your head will make it harder to get out and run, if you let it bother you, it’ll lead to more bad days, if you move on, you’ll see more good days. Good days can have a similar impact, if you let a good day go to your head, your expectations will go up and you’ll be disappointed more often with more bad days. If you enjoy the day, but do not adjust your expectations for the next few days, you’re more likely to have more good days.
Signs You’re Improving
Instead of hyperfocusing on your pace for a certain run, make sure you’re considering other factors with your runs, this will mean you’re less impacted by the good days and bad days, though these will also have their own good days and bad days.
You won’t dread runs as much as you progress. You may not look forward to them for a long time, but you’ll learn they’re not so bad, you’ll get out and do them, knowing you’ll feel better when you’re done.
You can run longer without stopping. More than likely, when you start, even a few minutes will feel like a large effort, as you progress, that’ll just be your warm up. Don’t lose sight of where you started and you’ll realize if your bad day today happened 6 months ago, it could have been a great day.
You’ll be less obsessed with your stats. I’m not going to say you’ll be in the zone and lose track of what you’re doing, though you’ll spend less time checking your watch because you’ll get a better feeling of what’s going on, your time, your distance, your pace and it’ll be less important.`
You’ll finish runs feeling better, you might be tired, but you’ll be more willing to do things other than hit the sofa for some television. Some days you may even be inspired to go cook a healthy dinner or keep moving and make it a productive day. Psst, whether or not you do more, it’s already been a productive day after you get in your run, that’s already a huge win in my book.
Summary
We all have good days and bad days, it’s important to take these in stride. Learn what you can from them, but move on and don’t let either go to your head.