Mid-Workout Bathroom Breaks

Audio Transcript

Coach Claire Bartholic: Hello everyone. In today’s episode, we have a question from Ian.

Ian: I’ll spare you the details, but during my interval session today, five times one kilometer with two-minute rests, I had to take a bathroom break after the third thousand and ended up taking more like a four-minute recovery. What should you do in those situations?

I just started my interval the second I got out of the convenience placed porta potti, but should I have jogged for a minute or was this the right thing to do? Any tips on how to avoid this all together?

Claire: Thanks for being brave enough to ask this slightly embarrassing question Ian. The first thing to remember is that bathroom issues happen to all runners at some point, so you certainly are not the first runner to go through something like this.

You asked what you should do in this situation and the quick answer is to do the best you can. When nature calls during a workout and you know you need to answer it, go ahead, and take the call and get back to work when you are ready.

You did nothing wrong and probably avoided a much more embarrassing situation by stopping when you did.

But I think what you are really asking is did you somehow violate the spirit of the workout by stopping longer than prescribed and or should you have eased back up to speed rather than hitting the ground running as soon as the porta potti door slammed shut behind you?

The way to figure out the answer is to determine the purpose of your workout. I talked about this in much more detail in episode 201 and that was all about the reasons for the rest periods of intervals.

You might want to go back and take a listen to that one to help you decide what to do in each case.

Without knowing how hard you are running it’s perfectly clear what the design of your kilometer workout was.

If you were running 5 or 10K pace for the thousands with two-minute jogs in between, that is more of a speed endurance interval session where what you do during the rests is just as important as the faster sections.

That kind of workout is great for building up your capacity for running longer at faster speeds but is not meant to be run in your very top gear.

On the other hand, let’s say you were running the one-kilometer repeats with full recovery.

A repeat differs from an interval because what you are trying to do is touch your top most speed that you can handle for the distance then recover completely and then do that five more times.

You should be able to go much faster than your 5K race pace for just one kilometer at a time. If you were doing the repeat workout, taking a couple extra minutes of rest does not really affect the workout at all.

Once you’re recovered, you’re recovered so another minute or two really doesn’t change much.

But in the first example, stopping completely for four minutes is different than jogging for two minutes and it will affect how you perform in the second part of the workout.

However, even though I just said that the extra brake will affect your performance, it doesn’t really matter that much.

What probably happened is that you might have been able to run the fourth interval a touch faster than the first three and that is not really a big deal.

Hopefully your pacing ability and discipline is so good that even though you might have felt like you could have run faster, you kept it even and hit your splits just as perfectly as the first three.

But if you’re like most people, your splits are not perfect even on the best of days and that’s just fine as well. For the most part, perfect splits are highly overrated. It’s your effort that really counts.

You asked if you should have jogged for a minute before starting the fourth interval.

Jogging a bit would have brought your heart rate up a bit higher before starting the faster kilometer, but it also would have stretched out that rest period into five minutes, which would be getting you even further away from the spirit of the workout.

Ultimately when you’ve got to go you’ve got to go. This is just one single workout and no one single mark out makes much of a difference in your fitness.

You still got five solid speedy kilometers in and that’s what’s important. I like to tell my athletes that done is better than perfect.

Now on to how to avoid this situation in the future. Sometimes it’s just unavoidable and it’s part of life.

Other times there are some patterns that you might want to look out for like the time of day, the timing of your meals, what you ate and drank, and whether you were getting sick will all affect your system.

Some people have to have a cup of coffee before they run to get things moving before they head out the door. Other people can’t eat or drink anything several hours before running or else they have bathroom issues every time they run.

If this is not an isolated incident, try to look for when this happens. Does this happen in the morning on an empty stomach?

If so, you might have to get up earlier to make sure that your entire system is empty before running. Does this happen when you run right after lunch?

Running on a full stomach can be quite uncomfortable so waiting an hour or two before running after a meal can help.

Did you eat something unusual? All runners have go to foods that they can rely on that won’t hurt their tummies.

If this is a frequent problem experiment with what is sure to sit well with you.

How’s your diet and regularity in general if you eat a mostly healthy diet that is full of nutrient rich fruits, nuts, seeds, whole grains, and vegetables regular ballot function is just one of the many happy side effects.

Completely overhauling your diet in one go even if it’s moving towards a healthier diet can be a bit of a shock to the system. It’s best to ease into all that good fiber intake gradually.

Hopefully this is not a recurring issue for you Ian and you can rest assured that your workout turned out just fine. Thanks for sending in the question.

If you have a question for us no matter how embarrassing, send it on over at runnersconnect.net/daily

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And that’s it for our episode for today. If you have a question that you would like to submit head over to runnersconnect.net/daily and send in your own. Have a great run today