Turn a Cancelled Event into Increased Fitness

This season, COVID-19 has not only impacted people’s lifestyles, travel plans and social gatherings but as endurance athletes it has impacted our training plans, socialization and at an even greater scale, it has impacted our event schedules.  

With many events being cancelled, it has left many athletes wondering what to do with their training.  Each of our coaches have spent countless hours on the phone, responding to emails and reassessing and redesigning training plans based on what we can currently expect to occur.  

With it being the beginning of the season we have found that our athletes most commonly fall into one of two categories.  Either their cancelled race was a tuneup race/”B” event, or they were a key “A” race. If your cancelled events are tune-up races there is really not much you need to adjust for.  

Typically with a tuneup race there may be a slight taper or recovery week prior to and/or after your event without a great deal of loss in training time.  This can be modified with an extention of the current training phase or even moving up the coming training phase to the next week. Once you have adjusted for those 7-14 days of recovery you are set to go.

For those of you who were keying up for an early season peak, don’t panic, your season is not over and your training has not been wasted, but there is a bit more to consider.  Here are some of the variables that must be factored in:

1. When has your event been rescheduled for?
2. Do you have any additional events that you wanted to be an “A” race and therefore you were planning on peaking for optimal performance?

These two questions lead to several common plans.  If there is enough time, which for many there tends to be ample time, we recommend you change your training from the specialization phase that you were in already, you can revert to a build phase of training.

If you have a second goal event, things become a bit more complicated.  You will need to gauge your current fitness, training load and time between events and determine if it is still possible to peak twice.  

This is an area where it is hard to provide you insight in an article because there are so many possibilities and “it depends” would be a blanket statement.  So, if “It depends” and you are uncertain of what to do, please reach out and we can help guide you through your training.