Why Your Running Plan Keeps Falling Apart
Over the past week, I’ve been writing about the mindset shift that has to happen when you’re in a season of work or life where you don’t have a lot of time to run.
Because when you have to leave the house by 6:45 AM, you never really know if you’re getting out of the office at 5 PM, and there’s always “one more thing” you could finish before you shut your laptop, you can’t keep planning your running like you have way more time and control over your week than you do.
You have to stop measuring what you’re doing now against what you think you should be doing and start being willing to work with the time you have.
1. Be Brutally Honest About How Many Days You Can Actually Run
The first step to being consistent with running when your life is chaotic is getting really honest about how many days a week you can actually run. Not on a good week. On a week where everything goes to sh*t.
For the runners I coach, this is usually three days a week. Even if they want to run four days a week, and think they can probably run four if they get out of work a little early on Tuesday or get up 30 minutes earlier than they usually do on Wednesday, or on “most” weeks they can do four…we start with three.
Because three is usually the number that can still get done even when you unexpectedly have to work on a Saturday, or you’re stuck on a call until 8 PM on a Monday night, or you get a bad night’s sleep because you’re stressed about a deadline and oversleep for your morning run on Wednesday.
It gives you enough extra room in the week that you can last-minute push that Saturday run to Sunday, that Monday run to Tuesday, or that Wednesday run to Thursday. The more days of running you stack into your week, the less room you have for adjustments when something inevitably doesn’t go according to plan.
Why Starting With Fewer Days Actually Gets You to More
You are capable of running four days a week, and you can make it work. But it’s so much easier to build up and add days as you go than it is to come back from the discouragement of putting four days of running on your schedule, not being able to get them all done, feeling bad about yourself and like you failed, and then being even less motivated to show up the next week.
If you’re struggling to be consistent, the answer isn’t to keep stretching yourself beyond what you can realistically do and then beating yourself up when you can’t keep up week after week. The answer is to give yourself a target you can hit consistently before you try to do more.
As your coach, I’d much rather see you run three days a week consistently for the next month or two than keep planning for four, running two or three, and getting in the habit of skipping runs every week.
And those weeks of running three days consistently aren’t just going to build the habit. They’re going to build your confidence. You get to spend a month or two showing yourself, hey, I can do what I said I was going to do.
Then, when you do feel ready to add a fourth day, you’re doing so on a foundation of consistency and confidence, which will make it way easier to be successful.
2. Plan Your Runs by Time, Not Miles
Once you know how many days you can realistically run, the next question is what those runs should look like.
If your running plan only works when life goes according to plan, it’s going to be really hard to stick with it…because it’s life, and things almost never go according to plan. The number of days you’re running is only part of it. How those runs are written matters too.
Why Mileage-Based Plans Backfire When You’re Busy
When runners first start working with me, they’ve usually been following an AI-generated plan like Runna. And those plans have them doing all of their runs in miles. 3-mile run on Tuesday. 10 x 400s on Thursday. 6-mile long run on Saturday.
But here’s what those plans miss: when you’re really busy, stressed, and tired, your schedule isn’t the only thing that’s unpredictable. Your pace is too.
Sometimes you run slower because you’re drained from being on your feet all day as a teacher or putting out fires all day as a CEO. So that 3-mile run that takes you 30 minutes on your best day might take closer to 40 when you’re working with 50% energy.
And when you only have 30 minutes to run, that’s a problem. You either have no idea whether you actually have enough time to finish, or you look at those 3 miles, know they’re going to take longer than usual, and just skip the run instead.
Time-Based Runs Change Everything
Enter: time-based runs. 30-minute run on Tuesday. 10 x 2 minutes on Thursday. 60-minute long run on Saturday.
Once you go time-based, you’ll never go back. You know exactly how much time to block out. A 30-minute run is going to take you 30 minutes. It doesn’t matter whether you feel amazing and cover 3 miles or you’re exhausted and only cover 2.5.
A slower day doesn’t change what counts as completing the run. You don’t have to hit a certain distance for the run to be “done.” If you’re tired and need to slow down, you can have a slow 30-minute run and still have done exactly what you were supposed to do.
And there’s way less pressure. You’re not racing the clock trying to finish your miles before you have to shower and leave for work. If you need to run slower that day, you can just…run slower. An easy run can actually be easy.
Whenever I make the first week of a plan for a new runner I coach, I work from the time they tell me they have available. If Tuesday has 30 minutes available for running, I’m giving you a 30-minute run. I’m not giving you 3 miles and making you live on a hope and a prayer that you have enough time to get it done.
From there, we can gradually build the time as your schedule allows and let the miles follow.
3. Adapt Instead of Abandon
Of course, you can start with a really realistic number of running days and plan every run around the time you have…and life will still find a way to mess with your plan. A meeting runs late. Your kid gets sick. You sleep through your alarm. Work absolutely kicks your butt and suddenly the 30 minutes you thought you had to run is now looking like 20.
And this is where I see a lot of runners fall into the all-or-nothing trap. If they can’t do the run exactly as it was written, they don’t do it at all.
A Thousand Ways to Adapt Before You Skip
There are about a thousand ways you can adapt or change a run before throwing it completely out the window.
If you wake up late and don’t have time for a 30-minute run, you can do 20. If you’re too tired for speed work, you can turn your 30 minutes with intervals into a 30-minute easy run. Or if running easy for 30 minutes feels like too much because, man, it’s just been one of those weeks, your stress is through the roof, and you really don’t feel like running for 30 minutes, you can walk/run. Walk for 2 minutes and run for 2. Walk for 4 and run for 2. Keep alternating until you’ve reached your total time.
Because whatever you do is always, always, always better than doing nothing.
Not just because it helps you maintain some fitness and endurance, but, most importantly, because you’re keeping the habit. You’re keeping the habit of showing up for the time you blocked off to run even when you don’t really want to. Even if you can’t finish it. Even if you walk half of it. Even if what you do looks nothing like what was originally written on your plan.
So when life gets better next week, or the week after that, or the week after that, whenever it gets better, because it always does, you’re not starting over. The habit is still there. And that makes it so much easier to slide back into your normal easy runs, intervals, and long runs when you have the capacity for them again.
Missing One Run Doesn’t Mean the Week Is Over
This same idea applies when you really do have to miss a run. Because sometimes there isn’t an adapted version that works. Sometimes the day gets away from you and the run just doesn’t happen.
But missing one run doesn’t mean the rest of the week has to go with it.
I see this all the time with the runners I coach: they miss Tuesday’s run, and suddenly Thursday’s feels less important. Then Thursday gets skipped too. And by Saturday it’s, “Well, this week is already screwed up. I’ll start again Monday.”
That’s perfectionism. It’s treating a week like it only counts if you execute the whole plan exactly as written, and if you can’t do that anymore, your gut reaction is to scrap it and start over next week.
Celebrate the Ugly, Imperfect Weeks
Because we can be honest: a week where everything goes according to plan and you have those pretty green check marks next to all your workouts, exactly where you planned to do them, exactly how you planned to do them, is so much more satisfying than looking at a week where you missed one run, had to shorten another, and had to push the third all the way to Sunday.
It’s not as pretty. It’s not as perfect. It doesn’t feel like something worth being happy about, or celebrating.
I urge you to do the opposite.
Celebrate the ugly, imperfect weeks even more than the pretty, perfect ones.
Because dang, you were committed. You were tough. You kept showing up and making it work while fighting all those little demons telling you, “What’s the point? Just skip it. This barely even counts. You’re not a real runner anyway. Why bother?”
Why Having a Coach Makes Consistency Easier
I also know it’s a heck of a lot easier to shorten the run, change the workout, and accept the ugly, imperfect week when you have a coach in your corner saying, “You’re doing it right. You’re still doing enough. You’re still doing what you need to do.”
Because then you don’t have to fight those demons alone.
And that’s why I do what I do for the runners I coach. When life gets crazy, you can text me and we figure out how to adapt the plan together. I’m there to hold you accountable to keep showing up, talk you through those moments when you want to say “screw it,” and remind you over and over again that the time you do have to give to running matters, and it can add up to so much more than you think.
And if you haven’t just been struggling with consistency, but struggling with your confidence around running and feeling like yourself, I want to coach you.
Because I know you’re probably selling yourself short. What you think is a lack of discipline or commitment or something wrong with you might actually just be a plan that needs to work better for your life right now, plus someone in your corner reminding you that you’re still a runner. You’re still capable of so much more than you’re giving yourself credit for. And you don’t have to give up on the goals that matter to you.
Ready to Stop Starting Over?
I also know it can feel scary to reach out to a coach when you already feel like you’re not consistent enough, not running enough, or somehow not “good enough” to have one.
But that’s the whole point of a coach: to meet you where you are and help you move forward from there.
If any of this resonated with you, book a free consultation call and tell me a little bit about what’s been going on with your running. No pressure. You don’t need to have a race picked out or have everything together. We’ll talk about where you’re at, what’s been getting in the way, and what getting you back to feeling like a runner could look like.
About Coach Abby
Abby Heffern is the founder of Wild Dog Athletics and an online running coach for marathoners, ultrarunners, and trail runners. A 14x ultramarathoner and 100-mile finisher, Abby combines personalized run programming with integrated strength training and the kind of daily, adaptive coaching that meets runners where they are. Learn more about coaching with Abby.
