Training "inertia" is a powerful thing

I've learned a few lessons over the winding road of my running career over the past few months, and so with these next few posts, I will chronicle a few of them, starting with my experience with what I have come to call training "inertia."

The principle of inertia is that objects in motion tend to stay in motion, and that objects at rest tend to stay at rest, unless they are acted upon by an outside force. More simply put – it’s easier to keep an moving object moving than it is to get it moving in the first place! My experience of the late summer and early fall has made it quite clear to me how much a similar principle applies to training.
The biggest mistake I made in all of this was to allow myself to get completely out of any kind of running routine back at the end of the summer. I wanted to pull back some because of the heat, and I don’t think that was a flawed plan in and of itself. However, in hindsight, I really needed to have had a clear plan for continuing to train in some fashion, and then I needed to stick with it. Once I was out of the rhythm of training, it was far too easy for me to come up with excuses not to work out on a particular day. I mean, really, what was I giving up? This was especially powerful because for a good part of this time, I was still trying to run in the morning, which meant getting up at 5 am. The urge to stay in bed for an extra hour was, unsurprisingly, quite strong. The fact that I wasn’t really even “breaking training” to do so made the impulse that much harder to overcome, and there were many mornings when I reset the alarm for 6 and crawled back into bed.

There is at least one key difference between real inertia and training inertia. In most cases, an object doesn’t become more difficult to move based on how long it’s been sitting still. That big rock in the middle of your yard is going to take as much effort to get rolling today as it would 3 weeks from now, unless special circumstances intervene. This is not true of training inertia. The longer you’re stopped, the harder it is to get started again, because your training being at rest, by its very nature, causes a number of outside forces resisting your motion to get stronger over time. You lose fitness, which means you know when you do go out again, it’s going to be more difficult. And because it’s been so long since you have run, it’s easier to build the mental case for how bad it’s going to be. On top of that, I was also letting my eating habits slide, so I was also putting weight back on. This only magnified the effects of the loss of fitness, because it obviously takes more effort to run the heavier you are. And of course, you find other things to do with the time that you had blocked out to train, so you have the extra effort of clearing the schedule back out to get started again.

So, one thing I must absolutely do going forward is to make sure I always have a clear training plan, and that I’m sticking to it. I still plan to treat summers as my offseason for running, but I need to replace whatever running I take out of my schedule with some form of training, to ward off both the physical and mental aspects of training inertia.