Why missing a week isn't the problem

THE Anatomy of a bad week (FROM SOMEONE WHO KNOWS!)

It usually goes something like this.

Monday. Big plans. You've written your three sessions down. You've laid your kit out. You are, frankly, an athlete.

Tuesday. Work runs late. Fine. Tomorrow.

Wednesday. Someone in the house is ill. By 9pm you're too tired to lift a cup of tea, let alone a dumbbell.

Thursday. It's raining. Not a little bit. Biblically.

Friday. Pizza. Nobody needs to know.

Saturday. You see someone's Strava. 15 miles before breakfast and a photo of a sunrise. You put your phone face down.

Sunday. You decide the week is a write-off and you'll start again properly. Monday. Definitely Monday.

Sound familiar? Me too. More often than I'd like to admit. And here's the thing nobody tells you when you start: that bad week isn't the problem. Not even close.

Why one bad week doesn't matter

There are 52 weeks in a year. If you have a rubbish one, you've still got 51 left. That's about 98% of the year still on the table. In most walks of life, 98% gets you a gold star and a sticker.

Fitness doesn't come from any single week. It comes from what you do most of the time, over months and years. One missed week barely makes a difference. Your heart, lungs and legs don't keep a diary. They're not sitting there asking "where were you on Thursday?"

The reality is, you lose very little fitness in a week. You might feel a bit rusty on your first session back, but that's about it. What you've built over the previous weeks is still there, waiting for you.

So if the week itself isn't the problem, what is?

The real problem: Monday

Monday has the best PR team in the world. It promises everything. Fresh start, clean slate, new you. And then the alarm goes off, it's raining again, and you've got a 9am meeting.

The real problem is all-or-nothing thinking. It goes like this: I missed Tuesday, so the week's ruined. The week's ruined, so I'll start next Monday. Next Monday comes, something gets in the way, so I'll start at the beginning of the month. Before you know it, you're waiting for January.

That's how one bad week turns into a bad month, and a bad month turns into "I used to do a bit of running".

I've seen it in myself and in loads of people I've trained with. It's almost never the missed session that ends things. It's the story we tell ourselves about it afterwards. "I'm rubbish at sticking to things." "I'm not the sporty type." "I always do this."

You're not rubbish. You had a busy week. Those are very different things.

My 2019, in one screenshot

If you think I've always been good at this, let me show you my training calendar from 2019.

Eight hours. For the whole year. 12 activities, and two of those were bike rides on Zwift, so that's ten runs. In twelve months. Take off the 26 km I did on the bike and I ran 82.6 km all year. That's less than 7 km a month, or about one parkrun and a bit of a jog home. Seven of those months had no running in them at all. February, May, July, August, October, November and December: nothing. Not a sausage.

Look at January, though. Four runs! New Year, new me. Then February arrived and new me went missing. It turned up again for one run in March and a twice in April. In May I got on the bike instead, presumably because running felt too much like hard work. Two runs in June, then nothing all summer. By September I'd managed one more, and I don't think I saw my running shoes again until the following year.

And those 10 personal records? Don't be too impressed. Eight of them came from those two Zwift rides. When you've barely been on a bike, every ride is a personal record.

Here's the thing. When I went back through those runs, the problem wasn't that I never started. I started loads of times. The problem was that I never once put two good weeks together. A run, then nothing. A couple of runs, then nothing. Every gap on that calendar began the same way: one missed run that turned into a missed month.

That wasn't someone who couldn't run. It was someone who never ran the week after.

A few years later I ran my first (official) marathon. Same legs. Same lungs, same family, same British weather. The difference wasn't talent. It was that I learned to string the weeks together. One good week, then another, then another. Not perfect weeks. Just weeks that followed on from each other.

So What to do the week after

This is the bit that actually matters. Not the bad week, but the next one.

Don't try to make up for it. You'll be tempted to cram in double sessions to catch up. Don't. That's how you end up sore, fed up and back on the sofa by Wednesday. Missed sessions are gone. Let them go.

Make the first one tiny. A 10-minute walk. One round of the home strength session. The goal isn't fitness, it's turning the tap back on. You're just proving to yourself that you're still someone who does this.

Don't wait for Monday. If you've had a bad few days and it's Thursday, start on Thursday. Thursday is just as good. Thursday doesn't make any promises, so it can't break them.

Don't miss twice. This is my favourite rule, and it's dead simple. Missing one session is life. Missing two in a row is the start of a new habit, and not the one you want. So if you miss one, make sure the next one happens, even if it's tiny.

Tell someone. "Had a terrible week, getting back on it today." Saying it out loud, or typing it, makes it real. And nobody worth listening to will judge you for it. Most of them will say "same".

Where the Club fits in

The PKS Training Club is built around the fact that bad weeks happen. It's not a streak app that sulks at you when you miss a day.

Every Saturday we share our highs and lows. Bad weeks get shared too, and they usually get the most replies. On Monday you make a fresh promise for the week, which means you never have to wait more than a few days for a clean start. And our weekly focus comes back to one rule more than any other: don't miss twice.

If you go quiet, someone will notice. Not in a telling-off way. In a "you alright? How can we support you" way. That's what gets most people back.

I'm opening 15 founding places at £20 a month, yours for as long as you stay a member. Get on the list and you'll be the first to hear when the doors open.

And if this week's been a bad one, go for a ten-minute walk today. Not Monday. Today.

Have a great week, folks. Or at least a better one.

Paul

The information in this post is general guidance. If you have pain, an injury or a medical concern, speak to your GP or a physio before starting something new.