You’re up early to hit the roads for a tempo run. You notice on your warmup that you feel a little more tired than usual but decide to go ahead with your scheduled run for the day. You get started and get through the first mile ok, but after that it becomes difficult to maintain your pace. You feel yourself gradually slowing as the effort becomes increasingly difficult. Finally at about half way through the planned distance, you call it quits and jog it in for the rest of the run. You’re left defeated that you had a bad workout. Now what? While it would be great to ace every workout on our training plan, bad workouts are bound to happen to runners at all ability levels and are a natural part of the training process. Various factors, including weather, hydration, stress, and fatigue will affect our performance from day to day. Staying in tune with your body and how these factors are affecting you is key to knowing when it is appropriate to adjust your scheduled training. There are several ways to make the most out of a run where you fall short of your goals. So don’t worry, your “bad” workout might not be that bad after all and you are still receiving physiological and psychological adaptations from it.

A common way to adjust a workout is to cut the planned distance and/or modify the goal pace. For example, if the goal of your workout is a 6 mile tempo run at 6:00/mile pace, you could either drop the distance to 4-5 miles and shoot for the same pace or stick to the planned 6 miles but make the goal pace easier, such as 6:10-6:15 or maybe even not worry about pace at all and make it more of an effort-based run. Breaking the run into shorter intervals is also an effective way to adjust it based on how you are feeling. Instead of running 6 miles straight through, you could split it into 6×1 mile or 3×2 mile as well as adjust the pace if needed.

While these are all effective ways of adjusting workouts, it can sometimes be challenging to implement them effectively since we often don’t realize we need to adjust our goals until after we have already started the workout. It might be that you go through the warmup feeling ready to go after the originally planned goal, only to struggle early in the workout and having to adjust on the fly. The type of adjustment you make, whether that be shortening/breaking up the distance or slowing the pace, is highly individual and should be done based on what you feel works best for you. There is no “best” strategy when it comes to adjusting workouts.

However, even when we do our best to recalibrate a workout, we still fall short of the more modest goals we set for ourselves. This is often quite defeating for many runners, but remember that an off workout will happen to everyone from time to time. When a workout still doesn’t go to plan even after adjustments are made, it’s best to finish out the run with an easy cooldown and call it a day. More often than not, an unsuccessful workout is due to the factors mentioned earlier rather than a lack of fitness. It is important to realize this, as runners could fall into the trap thinking they need to try harder after a workout they couldn’t complete. This will only result in more fatigue and frustration for not hitting goals. It’s usually best to take the next few scheduled runs extra easy as a way to both mentally and physically reset.

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