If your exercise sucks one day, don't sweat it!

Look, i get it... we all want to improve and there are very few things more frustrating to someone who considers themselves to be a bit of an athlete than to go out there one day and just not be able to find your groove. I've had it happen on bikes, on runs, on hill climbs (when i would do that), and even on weights.

You get in there, thinking that you are going to do great things and it just doesn't go your way. Maybe you actually feel as though you are losing ground on your progress. This has happened to me many many times.

There have been days that I have been at the gym looking at my notebook on the bench and I ate properly that morning, had a good night's rest and felt wonderful on my way into the gym only to not be able to do even 80% of what I did just a few days prior. In worse situations, I couldn't even match my performance from a month prior. This is frustrating and I have on many ocassions come very close to "rage quitting."

I would be willing to bet that this is most evident in running, which is what i focus on more than anything else these days and when I finish, feeling as though I really killed it during the run, only to look at my time and see that I was something like a full minute per km OVER what i consider to be my average.

So what do you do in these situations? For one thing, this might be an indicator that you need to take a few days off. The pros call these "rest days" and even though I am extremely anti-rest-day, it is something that all of us need to do from time to time.

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This happened to me yesterday as a matter of fact. I had the tunes kicking, it seemed like every stride of my run was completely on point, I had plenty left in the tank at the end of my 5k and then my neighbor looked up in shock as i shouted out "F*K! and this surprised her particularly because I am not a potty-mouthed person in most aspects of my life.

So today, instead of lacing up my boots and trying to kick my own ass for yesterday's failure I decided to do something else. I went on a bike ride. I didn't try to turn this ride into a race but instead I just kind of toured around. Just went and had a little look see and went down some streets that I normally wouldn't be on. I wasn't even looking at my pace and at no point was I "pushing it." Next thing i know I had a 40km ride in the bank and when i got back into my apartment i noticed that my legs were a little bit sore. This is a good thing in my book.

I may not have exercised exactly the muscles that I wanted to in order to improve my runs, but at least I did something. It also gave me a lot of time to think and just achieve a sort of peace about myself and the world around me. I did this without music and just took in the sights even though it was basically in parts of town that I am already very familiar with. It wasn't a competition and I still felt great about it afterwards.

So don't sweat the bad days because even though you may not have performed as well as you would liked to there is a relatively good chance that you are not training for the Olympics anyway. You are just trying to stay in shape. The bad days will make the good days seem even better and you always have that to look forward to.

This is the normie way and one that I have come to accept... and on that note I'm off to the bar to meet my friends for happy hour. Have a great day everyone!

_{from athlete, to fat-lete, and back... drinking beer along the entire journey}