What do you do when your events are cancelled?

Many of you are in this situation right now. You may have been cutting weight for a bikini competition, swimming laps for a triathlon, or logging miles for an endurance trail run. The pools are closed, the contests are cancelled, and now the motivation to focus on your daily training program has flown out the window.

So what do you do? Have you suddenly lost the urge to train, to run, to bike, to lift and even to eat well? If so then it may be time to start reassessing why you were training in the first place.

On March 19^th when my business was closed down by the state, I lost the focus to ride my bike even though I had been training for a June race for the last 5 months. The stressors of daily life got the best of me for a few days and I didn’t ride or do much else for nearly a week.

When we train for events it becomes our “job”… Following a plan with a specific goal gives us a focus, a purpose, and a reason to work hard despite already busy lives to achieve something that can make us in some way better.  
It took me a few days to find my new normal in all of this, but I decided that even if my event was to be cancelled, I wasn't going to allow this pandemic to effect my overall fitness and health for the entire summer. This time would be temporary and in the long run I owe it to myself to keep training as if I still have a race to ride.

How do you react when your GOAL is removed? This is the time to go back to your initial motivations. Races are short term. What are your long term goals? Why did you sign up? Was it truly just to cross the finish line? More likely it was to challenge yourself and find a potentially better version of you. Any training process develops and strengthens you as a person, and it is the process, not the outcome that creates the biggest benefit.

If you succeed in the process, whether or not you reach the goal doesn’t matter. But it can be easy to tell yourself that a process without a goal can be seen as a lot of time wasted for nothing. But it isn’t, the things you learn and experience during the training process have way more value than the event itself.

Most regrets come from things you don’t do in life. Ask yourself, at the end of this, which option will leave you with no regrets?