What to do When Life Gets in the Way: A Guide to Missing a Cycling Session

We’ve all been there, you’re due to do a training session, and something occurs preventing you from training that day. Whether that’s a work emergency, which means you need to stay until the issue is sorted, or there’s a family crisis, or you don’t feel well (or perhaps even not well recovered from a prior training session) - for whatever reason you have to skip that session, so what do you do?

The first thing to understand is that everyone encounters this issue at some point, whether they’re a World Tour Pro preparing for the Tour de France, or someone trying to get ready for the local triathlon. Once you realise this then you can do the most important thing - which is to simply not stress about missing the session. Stress - in this instance - is a negative feeling and that can cause negative effects to your health and your performance. So, please don’t stress.

Work/Family Issue
The next thing to ascertain is what has caused you to miss the session? If it is something such as a work or family crisis then please tend to this, don’t panic, and get whatever it is sorted. Unless you’re a World Tour pro these issues are way more important than your training and of course a family issue could still be more important than your training even if you are a World Tour Pro! If it’s not a work or family issue and it’s something to do with your health then we’ll come to that shortly.

Now look at the training you were supposed to do that day. Was it a key endurance session (such as your week’s longest ride) or an interval session? If so, can you reschedule this a different day? Maybe you can do it tomorrow, or the day after. If that’s the case then really you’ve solved things and there’s no need to take further action. For most people you don’t need to add on extra hours (to make up for lost time) or force yourself to do extra intervals or anything extreme like that. You move the (important) session to a later date and drop the unimportant session you were due to do on that new day.

On the other hand if the session you missed was a low-key session such as perhaps an easy endurance ride then you can just miss it, or perhaps add some extra time to another endurance session. It’s unlikely you’d add the whole duration of the missing session to another day except in certain circumstances (e.g., you were in an overload training block).

If the session you missed was a very light day such as a recovery spin, then just lose the session. It’s so unimportant that it just doesn’t need redoing anywhere else!

Illness
What happens when you’ve been ill? I’m just going through this process myself! Tuesday I was due to race. Monday I’d done a steady ride and been to the gym. Monday evening I had some dinner and literally about 30-minutes later my ‘tummy’ felt not quite right. An hour or so later I went to bed, but was woken up with severe stomach pains, and for the next 5 hours I spent the night throwing up. Fantastic fun! First thing i realised was that racing wasn’t going to happen, which was annoying, but there’s another race the following week, and so I had to replan my training. Tuesday morning I felt ok, but washed out and did a light endurance ride. Same on Thursday (after briefly trying some MIET and realising that it felt significantly harder than it should). My body was still healing, so the idea is to keep things gentle, which I’ll do for the remainder of the week. With conditions such as a head cold, or mild stomach issues then just making things easy, listening to your body and not pushing for a few days is the way forward. For more serious infections or issues then you may need some time off. Missing the hard session (or in my case a race) is the most important thing to do when you’re ill - there’s no point adding stress and strain when your body is already under the weather.

Recovery
Eat well, maintain your protein intake (or even up it), keep hydrated - especially if you have been ill and in both scenarios avoid the stress of worrying that you’ve missed your session(s). If you’re unable to not worry then it’s well worth seeking out methods to reduce your stress (such as meditation or yoga, etc). Being stressed about missing a session isn’t helpful. Training is built upon consistency and multiple training sessions (not just one). So, relax, and move on.

Coaching
Of course, if you’re coached by CycleCoach then simply asking your coach what to do will provide a pathway. I’m always happy to reschedule a session and we use these guidelines above to help move things around.