Be a quitter! How I broke my workout streak – and crushed my fitness goals
I I don’t log every run I do, so I can’t tell you exactly how many times I’ve laced up my sneakers, or how far they’ve taken me in the last 10 years. But I track enough to know that I have run more than 1,849 times and 13,948 km. That’s 8,667 miles, or about a third of the way around the world. Just go! If I didn’t try to eat less sugar, I would give myself a cookie.
After all that sweating and sanding, you’d think I’d got the hang of it. I would do my pee before I ran, go out the door and just put one foot in front of the other until I covered the distance I planned to do.
Not a little bit. After ten years of running three or four times a week, I still stop early because I hate it, because I’m more tired than I thought, or because something is just not right. Two weeks ago, after starting my morning run with what was supposed to be a solid 10-11km, I got off after 2km and got on a bus. The reason? All I can say is that I didn’t feel it.
Most of my runs are runs that I start and end at home. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve traveled them by bus or train.
I don’t feel bad about this, or about all the times I leave the pool too early because it’s too crowded or I can’t find my rhythm. As long as my overall motivation is strong, I tell myself, it’s often best to cut a bad workout short and save my energy for the next one.
However, according to many fitness fanatics, this is NOT the way to do things. Whether it’s a leg day at the gym, or a tempo run in the park, the plan is sacred, and to deviate from it is to risk all the hard work you’ve put in to get where you are. It’s weak, it’s stupid, it’s a foot on a slippery slope. Before you know it, you’re welded to the couch, barely strong enough to open another tube of Pringles.
Hence the popularity of the “streak,” where you try to train every day, from here to eternity. I’ve fallen down that rabbit hole myself, to the point where I still did my scheduled push-ups despite having such horrible food poisoning that I couldn’t get more than a few feet from the toilet.
And that’s nothing compared to my stupidity 13 or 14 years ago, when I lived in the mountains and swam in the mountains. a long, cold lake. Usually it was only two lengths, and I did it slowly, but it amounted to about 3-4 km – say 150 lengths of a typical leisure centre pool. The season was short and I usually stopped when the temperature started to drop. But this time I kept going well into the autumn. I didn’t have a wetsuit, and this wasn’t the kind of place where lifeguards were on duty. Even in the summer I was sometimes the only person in the water.
After 2-3 km, while walking back to where I left the car, I started shivering. I now know that this is one of the first signs of hypothermia. The wisest thing would have been to get out of the lake and walk, but that didn’t even occur to me. It wasn’t in the plan, and maybe the cold reached my brain too. So I swam for another 40 or 50 minutes, shivering the whole time. I survived (obviously), but the more I think about it, the more I realize how lucky I was. If I had gotten into trouble, no one would have seen me, let alone saved me.
Now that I realize that sometimes it’s best to just ignore a plan, I’m happy to find that many experts feel the same way. They just don’t make a big deal about it. Take Michael Ulloaan Edinburgh-based nutritionist and personal trainer. “We’re constantly told that if we can’t stick to a plan 100% then we’ve somehow failed,” he says. “That’s absolutely not true. It confuses people. If we deviate from a plan, we shouldn’t think about it too much. We should ask ourselves why we’ve deviated and what we can do to reduce the chance of it happening again. Have we tried to do more than we can handle? Are we not enjoying our current training programme? Or are we just tired and need to give ourselves a day or two off.”
“It’s easy to overanalyze and be too critical of yourself, but that’s really not necessary,” he says. “Most of us aren’t professional athletes, we’re just regular people doing our best – and sometimes we have to take a day off when it feels like too much.”
You might expect Simon Lord, a personal trainer from Oxfordshire, to be more inflexible. In preparation, he has been cycling around 160 miles a day since the start of the year a 24 hour charity ride from London to Amsterdam. But he is surprisingly relaxed. “It’s common to overthink the results of one training session, but it’s unproductive,” he says. “Sleep, stress, diet and weather plus recent harder efforts can all play a role in performance changes, so I encourage people to remind themselves of the longer-term trends: ‘Okay, today you only have three sets of 10 reps done with a weight of 45 kg’” – he is talking about lifting weights – “’but look where you were four months ago, when all you could dream of was 45 kg.’”
As regards Amanda Katz, a New York-based personal trainer and running coach, when a client abandons the plan, she says, “I applaud them for making the right choice. They are encouraged to deviate if they are not equipped to train – for example if they feel sick, injured, under-recovered or low on fuel.”
Those aren’t the only valid reasons to quit a workout, says Ulloa. “One thing that is often overlooked is simply ‘if you don’t feel it’. I know some people may think I’m making excuses or being ‘weak in spirit’. But I always recommend prioritizing your mental health. Some days your mind just isn’t in it, and no amount of miles of running or reps of barbell squats will fix that. On days when I don’t feel 100%, I always go into training thinking: ‘Give yourself permission to stop.’ Start the workout, see how you feel, and then decide whether you want to continue. Nine times out of ten you will. But some days you just need a break.”
In April, Ulloa was scheduled to compete in Ironman 70.3, a 113km run, bike and swim. “I had trained for six months leading up to the event and decided to pull out of the race with three weeks to go,” he says. “I have an 18-month-old son who recently started childcare, and we had been so sick for a few weeks. It meant I had to miss a huge chunk of my training schedule and I wasn’t physically or mentally ready. I probably could have gotten through it, but it wouldn’t have been good for my body or my mental health. So I pulled out. It was frustrating, but that’s life. I prioritized my wellbeing and I have no regrets.”
I’ll think about that the next time I cut a workout short—or, perhaps, lengthen it because it’s going so well. That happened recently, when a 14K run turned into an 18K. Because that’s the other possibility that comes with being less fixated on the plan: sometimes you reach your goal—and you just keep going.