It’s that time of year where it seems like everyone is headed somewhere be it to the cabin, the lake, a road trip or a destination vacation. How fun! We can’t wait to hear about all of your adventures. Every year, we get questions about how to keep fitness in your vacation and travel plans. 

In a perfect world, travel and vacation plans are perfectly timed with our training plans and goal events. However, In reality, when we take into account vacation time, kids schedules, family requests and availability, it seems that more often than not travel and vacation plans intersect in perfectly horrible timing for training and goal events. 

So, what to do? Give up on a goal? Not schedule an event? Not really what we have in mind! Instead we’d like you to approach the challenge of sensibly adding training to your travel  routine. This means finding the balance of time to train and time spent seeing the sights or playing with the kids. It means being creative and re-framing what “training” looks like and it means including the challenge of eating and drinking in a way that will support your training goals. 

And yes, it is a challenge!

As we are heading into the new year, I’ve been thinking a lot about resolutions, goals and intentions. A new year brings a lot of possibilities but understanding how last year’s goals played out can have a profound effect.

It might seem like an odd time to be talking about post event emotions as we are all excited about picking new events as we start a new year. An athlete can be coming off a big season, can be unsure of the year ahead, have been stressed by the holidays or even just in a funk. Jumping right into the new year sometimes can be harder than expected.  

Over the past couple of months, I’ve had two or three athletes reach out to me about being in a “funk” after completing their goal event for the year. First, kudos to them to acknowledging the “funk” and reaching out! The “post race blues” or “post season blues” are always a consideration for me as a coach as it is important to help my athletes understand that recovery is not just about physical recovery but mental recovery too. And it’s something to consider when signing up for those big events or planning for resolutions!