Yep, you aren’t alone. This is a hard time of year for an athlete. If you’re a winter athlete, your season is just starting to ramp up. If you’re a summer athlete, you’re probably at the tail end of some rest, maybe a little cranky, and itching to get back to feeling like an athlete.
Regardless of the reason, the things that comfort us about our routines are about to go to shit. There will be endless cookies, there will be stress, there will be boozy egg-nog, there will be family drama. And all of these things WILL affect how you eat, how you recover, how you train, and how you cope. BUT, the holidays can also be pretty great, right? The cookies are delicious, the stress is because you love your family and all their weirdness, and the egg-nog is, well, egg-nog. So how do we maximize both? How do we make sure that we enjoy the hell out of the holidays, but also not set back our training by weeks? I’ve put together a little Holiday Survival Guide for endurance athletes.
- Expect stress and chaos. I’ve never met a functioning adult who doesn’t have a little stress around the holidays. It’s normal. Managing schedules, agendas, traditions, and kids/dogs is not easy. But it’s worth it. Let go a little of that type-A neurosis. You might not be able to follow your plan perfectly. Have grace with your people and have grace with yourself.
- Be present. The best way to multiply stress is by thinking about training all the time. Constantly worrying about food and inactivity will just turn you into an a-hole. Plan your training well and when you aren’t training, enjoy your people! Ask questions, be engaged, play with the kids.
- Enjoy the food. Yes, you might not come out of the holidays at your goal weight. But unless you’re going to Bejing in February 2022, a couple pounds at Christmas isn’t going to hurt you, and it’ll come right off with good training in January. This doesn’t mean you need to say yes EVERY time your family-food-pusher shoves a sweet at you, but have some cookies and boozy egg-nog, dammit.
- Set expectations. Talk to your people about what the general schedule is, and then make your training fit within and around that. Once you have YOUR plan, communicate that with your people. This gives them a chance to be on your team, and HELP you get out. And for crying out loud, be reasonable. Don’t schedule a four-hour ski or ride on Christmas morning.
- Don’t drop the little things. It can be really easy to try to hyper-maximise efficiency with training over the holidays, whether out of guilt or excitement to be with the family. But certain parts of that routine are extremely important to coming out of the holidays not feeling like shit. Make sure you’re keeping up some kind of activation/warmup routine, even if it’s a toned down version. Keep stretching after your workouts. Keep drinking a lot of water. And for shit sake, keep eating DURING training. I don’t care how many cookies you ate this morning, if you go for a two hour ski, you still need to have a snack during it.
- Lower the workload a touch. This time of year is stressful, even if you LOVE IT. The body doesn’t really know the difference between physical and psychological stress. So in order to not run yourself ragged, it might be good to lower the workload a little bit. Maybe that looks like a little less volume, or maybe it looks like a little less intensity.
And finally, ENJOY IT! The holidays are supposed to be fun. Be a little selfish. Let yourself do what fills YOUR cup, and use that full cup to fill everyone else’s.
