Sometimes you have to hit reset on your training

The last blog I wrote was about what to do as an athlete when you get sick. Hopefully, you get healthy quickly and can get back to your training plan easily enough. Sometimes though, as was the case for me, you stay sick for a long time and get knocked off the training plan that you had in place. If you are sick long enough, it can impact your plans for the season and what events you were planning on trying to be your best at. This is when we all start to get discouraged.

Hold on though. What we all tend to forget is how long the cycling season actually is. Even if your plans to do well in May don’t work out, the season extends all the way through to September, even October in some areas. Remember how often your fellow riders  (and perhaps you) are burned out come summertime during the best riding of the year? They were so focused on riding well in the spring that they neglected to pace themselves over the course of the full season.

Don’t be afraid to hit the reset button. Take a bit of a break and re-assess where you are headed with your training. Often in the professional peloton, you will see riders that were injured in the early part of the season coming on strongly in the second half of the year, notching up some superb results. They re-focused at the time of their injury and created a new plan to follow. Then at the end of the season, when everyone else is tired, they are riding high on their best form of the year. Don’t think that being injured or sick and missing their targets wasn’t hard for them, but what they didn’t do was give up.

If you have been sick or injured take a deep breath, take a look around, hit the reset button and make some new plans to motivate yourself in training. You might be surprised at the new highs in fitness you can attain.