On the Edge

- For the last few days this week (since Monday), I've been in a pretty bad mood. Easily irritated with the family, the dog, you name it. It was especially bad last night, and today, I woke up in a bad mood.

- Including the Preparation phase, I've been working the Morris Strength plan since Dec 30, without any breaks longer than 2 days.

- There's usually a reduction in the quality of my training on a weekday compared to a day on the weekend, but I thought last night's workout was worse than normal. I noticed it with the upper body work. Saturday I did a total of 22 pullups (a little better than normal), last night I struggled to get a total of 17 (worse than normal).

- My legs are now not recovering very well. Last Sunday, during the day, my legs felt terrible... just walking around, going up the stairs, etc. Napping didn't help much; rolling them didn't help much.

- I'm just starting the 2-week Strength-Power phase. There's no scheduled rest block between this and the 4 week Endurance phase.

When you put it all together, the problem and the required action are pretty clear: I've been going too hard for too long and I need to rest. The hard part is that, unless you put it all in one place like I just did, it's not always so easy to see. It's also hard to battle your ego and decide that the best thing to do is to rest. I like to call this the "art" of training.

So, I'm going to postpone the Sprint Interval workout I had scheduled for tonight. My plan is to take the next three days off and see how I feel by Friday night / Saturday morning. I think this should be enough, but we'll see. Then I'll get going again.

Over the past few years, I've come to the conclusion that the most important thing you can do is to avoid getting sick. Say you get sick, maybe you miss a week while you're actually sick. Then it takes maybe another two weeks to build back up to where you were before you got sick. That's three weeks where you made no progress. If the decision is between missing 1-2 days of training or making no progress for 3 weeks, the choice is pretty clear!