The Parts of Training Nobody Puts on the Program
Trail Notes | Real Talk
the plan tells you what to run. it doesn't tell you what to do with the weeks you don't recognise yourself in
The Parts of Training
Nobody Puts on the Program.
Every training plan describes the runner it's building. Consistent. Improving. Showing up for the long run even on the mornings it would be easier not to.
Most weeks, that description holds up reasonably well. Some weeks, it doesn't come close. Motivation disappears. Work gets heavy. Sleep falls apart. A run that should have felt easy doesn't. Life happens alongside training, and a program can't always tell you what to do with that part.
Trail Note · 01
The Gap Is Normal, Not a Sign of Failure
Many runners carry around an idea of the athlete they think they should be: the one who never skips strength, handles a bad run without spiralling and feels calm and capable most of the time.
Real training rarely looks that tidy. Some runners barely notice the gap between the ideal and the reality. For others, it becomes a quiet, persistent sense that they are falling short of a standard nobody else actually set.
Sport psychology has a name for part of this: athletic identity, or the extent to which we define ourselves through our role as an athlete. Research dating back to the early 1990s describes something of a double-edged sword. A strong athletic identity can support commitment and consistency, but it can also mean an ordinary setback — a missed session, a slow race or a rough training block — feels like evidence about who we are rather than simply what happened that week.
The more tightly running gets tied to your sense of self-worth, the harder ordinary setbacks can land.
A missed session. A slow race. A week that falls apart. None of these tells you very much about the runner you are becoming when viewed on its own.
Trail Note · 02
What Doesn't Help
Comparison rarely helps, and it is remarkably easy to do by accident. A feed full of other people's peak weeks tells you very little about the flat ones, the interrupted ones or the sessions that never happened.
Neither does pretending a rough patch isn't happening and hoping more discipline will quietly fix it. Sometimes consistency is the answer. Sometimes the problem is sleep, stress, illness, pain, recovery, hormones, fuelling or simply too much load sitting in the same week.
And try not to turn every difficult week into a referendum on whether you still belong here. Most runners have periods where the answer to “Do I still want this?” feels less obvious than usual. One hard week does not require a big conclusion.
When the week doesn't look like the plan
Before deciding you've failed, ask three better questions.
1. What has actually changed?
Look beyond motivation. Sleep, illness, stress, soreness, menstrual symptoms, fuelling, work and family load can all change how training feels.
2. Does the session need effort, adjustment or recovery?
Those are different decisions. Training well sometimes means completing the session. Sometimes it means reducing it, swapping it or resting.
3. What is the most useful next action?
Not the action that proves you're committed. The one that best supports the training block you're trying to build.
Final Trail Note
What Tends to Help
Saying the actual thing out loud — to a coach, in the group chat or beside someone on a group run — often helps more than silently trying to fix yourself.
“I haven't wanted to run for two weeks.” Or “I don't feel like myself out there right now.” Both are complete and useful things to say. They are said in this community often enough that they rarely land as a surprise.
Separating the feeling from the facts helps too. Feeling like a fraud on the start line and actually being unprepared for it are two different things. Feeling flat in training and losing fitness are two different things. Missing a session and losing the whole block are very different things.
Research on self-compassion in sport supports this distinction. Studies involving women athletes have found that responding to mistakes and difficult sporting experiences with greater self-compassion is associated with less rumination and self-criticism, alongside more constructive ways of moving forward. Taking yourself seriously does not require being relentlessly hard on yourself.
A sustainable training history isn't built only from the weeks where everything goes to plan. It is also built through the weeks where you learn how to adjust without abandoning the bigger goal.
Sometimes showing up means running. Sometimes it means shortening the run, taking the recovery day, eating properly, getting more sleep or telling your coach what is going on. None of those things sits outside the training plan. Done well, they are part of it.
Research informing this Trail Note
Brewer, Van Raalte & Linder (1993), Athletic identity: Hercules' muscles or Achilles heel? International Journal of Sport Psychology, 24, 237–254.
Mosewich, Kowalski, Sabiston, Sedgwick & Tracy (2011), Self-Compassion: A Potential Resource for Young Women Athletes. Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 33(1), 103–123.
Ferguson, Kowalski, Mack & Sabiston (2015), Self-compassion and Eudaimonic Well-Being During Emotionally Difficult Times in Sport.
you don't have to feel like a runner every day to still be one
Written by the Her Trails coaching team
Trail Notes are real talk, written for women in the middle of it.
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