Perhaps my number one obstacle to training is not energy, motivation, or injury; rather, it is time. Training for a marathon is an exercise in efficient time management. Like going to school part-time or even spending time with your kids, one needs to establish a schedule and stick to it. I honestly believe this is the biggest challenge to prepare for a marathon.
If you don’t set a regular time in your daily schedule for running, you will find yourself each day trying to figure out the best time to run, which increases the risk of allowing routine matters to get in the way and push out the new kid on the calendar.
Missing a run every now and then is forgivable, but two or more misses messes up your progress and possibly exposes you to stressed muscles, cramps and soreness, and injury. Also the first run after a few misses is not often a comfortable, relaxing run. If by missing some runs leads to unpleasant running, you’ll be more tempted to avoid running. And if you establish a pattern of missing more and more training runs, well, I don’t want anything to do with you.
Take it seriously. Look at a calendar now and determine a sort of protected “church time” on your daily schedule that you’ll devote to training.
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