Should You Skip A Workout When You’re Tired

Audio Transcript

Sinead: Sinead Haughey with you today and I’m the director of premium content at Runners Connect.

Today’s questioner asks, “I usually hate missing workouts and like to stick to my schedule dead on. What should you do if you’re bone tired and have been for the whole week? Is it best to skip the workout, in this case a speed workout, or attempt it at the risk that it may make you more tired for your long run on the weekend? I assume the long runs are the most important or are they not?”

This is a fantastic question that we often get at Runners Connect. When you’re in the thick of a training segment, it’s not unusual to come into these weeks where you feel like you’re in a rut. In those days, everything, from easy days to workout days, feels like they require more effort than they typically do.

This is very common and a natural part of training. When you are in the thick of a training segment and you come into the more specific phase of your training, where you are adding in more intensity, and more speed-oriented workouts, it can often be hard for your body to adjust. It takes a little bit of time for it to do so.

This can cause fatigue. There are other factors too, whether it be from work, not getting adequate sleep and so on. Obviously, these are hard to avoid when we have so much on our plate and our schedules are busy.

Sometimes, these stresses can add up at once and these obviously will cause a little bit more fatigue. I know that for me, there have been times where I have been in a bit of a time crunch with work and had to either miss out on some crucial hours of sleep or actually have to skip a run. I was so busy that I didn’t have time to fit my run into my day.

When these weeks come up, as they are going to, it’s inevitable. It’s good to know how to prioritize all the runs within your weekly schedule, depending on the distance of the race that you are training for.

It also depends on where you are in your training cycle. If you are in the early stages of your training cycle or you are in the final weeks leading up to your goal race.

I’m not sure what our questionnaire is training for, but if you happen to be training for something longer, like a half marathon or marathon, then you’ll need to prioritize your longer and more endurance-oriented workouts.

These would obviously be the long run as you said, or even a temple run, or a long interval session. Alternatively, if you are training for something shorter, like the 5K or the 10K, you want to prioritize the more speed-oriented workout in your week.

This could be a speed workout or a hill session. Again, if you’re training for something longer, like the half marathon or marathon, the training sessions that make up the foundation of your week will be those longer training sessions; more endurance-oriented sessions like long runs and temple runs.

If you’re training for the 5K or 10K, the more speed-oriented workouts are what make up the foundation of your training week.

Therefore, you need to put more emphasis on those training sessions. If you come into a week where your training is either going to be compromised due to fatigue or you have a busy schedule that week, you need to determine which workouts or training sessions are the most important to you, depending on the race that you’re training for.

A lot of runners come into little ruts like this, but if this is how you’re feeling, then I recommend that you either skip the speed workout or reduce it.

You can reduce it by taking a few intervals off the speed workout, or by making the times that you’re trying to hit a little bit slower, to accommodate for the fatigue that you’re feeling.

Say that you are doing 6 by 800 meters, 3 minutes per 800. Instead you could either do 4 by 800 meters while still hitting 3 minutes per 800 or you could do the same workout, 6 by 800 meters but this time slowing the pace down just slightly so. Instead of three minutes, you might hit 305s or 310s.

While it may not feel like you’re getting a lot out of the workout like this, the effort is still there and the work is still there. You’re still getting a lot of benefits from completing the workout, even if it’s not exactly what was on your schedule.

I know runners tend to feel guilty if they aren’t completing exactly what is specified on their schedule. I can relate to that but when you do something rather than doing nothing at all, you’re still going to get some benefits from that.

This is what I recommend as opposed to skipping the workout entirely. If you have to skip a training session because you’re very busy that week or you’re exhausted, try and prioritize the training session in your week that is more important to the distance that you will be racing.

Earlier on, I also said that you need to focus more of your attention on different training sessions depending on where you are in your season. For instance, if you are in the early phases of your training cycle where you are trying to build the foundation of aerobic endurance, then you come into a week where you’re either too busy or too tired to complete all your runs, then this is one of those weeks where you want to focus on your long run or a longer training session, like a temple run.

This is the time where you are trying to build your aerobic capacity and general endurance. Alternatively, if you are coming into the last phase of your training where you are doing more race specific workouts, more speed-oriented, kind of interval workouts, then these need to be the workouts that you place the most emphasis on.

For instance, if you’re training for something like the 5K or 10K, and you’re in these last three to four weeks before the race, if you have to miss a long run or even a reduced long run, you can at least rely on all the endurance and the foundation that you’ve built at the beginning of the season.

If you are doing a half marathon or a marathon, these last few weeks need to be focused on the longer training sessions within your week, whether those be temple runs or your long run.

These ensures that you will be able to go the distance on marathon day, whereas the more speed-oriented workouts will ensure that if you are training for a 5K or 10K, you will be better able to sustain the paces for those distances.

I will say at Runners Connect, we have down weeks built into your schedule, so that every three weeks you come into a down week where you are doing 10 to 20% less mileage than you would be in a normal volume week.

This really allows your body to catch back up with you and adapt to any changes in volume or intensity that you’ve been adding into your training over the weeks. This also helps to increase your stress threshold without exceeding it.

Running isn’t the only stress that we have in our lives. There are a lot of good and bad stresses within any given day. These all add up to contribute to your stress thresholds.

You think about our stress threshold as an empty glass. Running fills part of the glass, but then all of the other stresses in our lives fill the remainder of the glass.

The good news is that your stress threshold can be increased as you continue with your training. That’s why we build these down weeks into our training plans, so that you never exceed your stress threshold at any given point.

You have to try and monitor the other stresses in your life as you continue to increase your training and up your mileage.

If you are running more, then you’re going to require more sleep at night and you’re also burning more calories so you have to eat more food and more nutrient dense foods.

Again, this is easier said than done. Sometimes life events come together all at once and it can be impossible to keep all of these things in check.

That’s where you have to prioritize your training sessions depending on where you are in your training cycle, and also the distance of the race you’re training for.

One more thing I’ll say is that if you have to skip a training session entirely, particularly something like a speed workout, then you’ll need to recycle that workout either the following week or the week after, because training cycles are obviously progressive in nature, and each training session builds off of the other. You can’t really just scrap a workout like this and move on to the next one.

You’ll still have to do this work out so that you can gain the ability to jump and do the more intense workout later on.

As you heard at the beginning of this episode, we at Runners Connect know that sometimes interruptions come up. This is where we are happy to adjust your schedule so that you’re doing everything you need to do, without doing too much and trying to catch up too fast.

Thank you so much for submitting that question. It’s a great question and I really enjoyed answering it. I really hope all our listeners today can take away some of the information I gave you and use it in their own training.

For those of you listening that want to have your question answered by one of the Runners Connect coaches, you can head on over to RunnersConnect.net/daily and click the record button to send your question over.

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Thanks for listening and have a great day ahead.