No Excuses

Every day without exception I run across one Pinterest photo or another along the same lines, “No Excuses.” And every morning without exception I think, wouldn’t it be nice if I could live by this motto. But unfortunately I am human and life is full of excuses. One of my kids was awake all night with a stomach virus, one of the dogs made a mess of his crate, or I am just plain exhausted from having tried to cram too much into the previous day. There is always an excuse.

But, Coach Jeff is right, the trick to any good training season, before speedwork, before hill repeats, before heart rate training, is consistency. Without consistency there is simply no way for a race to go to plan. Jeff’s other favorite saying is to work the plan. Well, there we go again. If we are to work the plan, there is no real room for excuses. So, what do we do?

How do we move past the excuses? How do we take what we are dealt and still move forward? With a plan. Whether you use a coach or a training program you found in a book, the plan is the first step to consistency. Yes, you still have the excuses. There will still be days when the workout is just not going to happen. But with a plan you can begin to juggle. You can move today’s workout to tomorrow and try to fit a shorter workout into today. You can juggle your workouts to fit with your life and you can develop the consistency, even with the excuses, that will inevitably get in the way.

Without a plan procrastination sets in. You push the workout to tomorrow but you can just as easily skip it tomorrow as well. Without a plan you have no map and without a map, you will not get to that destination.

Today, I missed my workout. But I have a plan. I know where I will move things around and I will get it done. Because I have built the consistency I don’t doubt that I will make it to the finish lines I have set out for myself this fall. Yes, I have excuses and yes, life gets in the way. But with a plan and consistency, those excuses are not roadblocks. Instead they become speedbumps. They slow me down but they don’t stop me.