Plan A CAN sway

I am a stickler for sticking to plan A, because, surely you wouldn’t have made it plan A if it wasn’t the best route to follow. I can get very set in my ways and don’t like it when plan A doesn’t go as it should. I convince myself that plan A is the only route and any other pathway will lead to failure. However, life is not as straight forward as plan A, and sometimes we have to resort to plan B, C, D or maybe even E or F, whether we like it or not. It may not always be out of choice, but sometimes change is necessary, and this is ok.

Training this week didn’t go quite to plan. I felt very tired on Tuesday during my session and the legs were having none of it, so I called it a day halfway through the session. I don’t tend to do this easily, so it takes me truly feeling like crap, for the plug to be pulled. I then switched my days around, took a rest day on Wednesday, and got back to it on Thursday, unsurprisingly feeling much much better. I listened to my body, gave it a little extra recovery time, and resorted to plan B. Despite what my irrational brain might of said, this won’t have set me back. If anything, it may pushed me forward, as I listened to my body rather than fighting it for days, or possibly weeks.

PC: Paul Stillman

Plan A may be the most straight forward, but it isn’t always the best for where you are at NOW. When training plans are first made, you look at the weeks ahead with the intention that they will all go swimmingly. Unfortunately, or maybe even fortunately, this doesn’t always happen. The plan may be set, but it is always open to change depending on how you feel. Life can be random, so we have to be flexible and react to what it throws at us from time to time. We can’t predict what will happen every day, so we can’t predict how all our sessions will go. The important part is reacting sensibly and remaining positives 

It is also important to focus on YOU. It doesn’t matter if everyone else has had the best week of their lives. They probably have had a bad session at some point, they just choose to only reveal the perfect ones on social media. You are doing the week that will prepare you to be the strongest athlete you can be, and if that looks different to somebody else’s because your body needs a bit more time to recover, that’s ok. Listen to what your body is telling you. 

As my coach told me, you are never in the same place twice, and he was speaking some pretty good sense. We don’t always see it, but it is true. No matter how similarly things go, something is always different. Whether it be the weather, how you felt, where you approached something from, or what you had done the weeks prior, something is always different. Therefore, you need to be prepared to make changes along the way the allow scape for different situations. Be adaptive, and as hard as it can be, be flexible with plan A. When it gets nearer to the time, sometimes plan B is the better route to take.