Excuses Are Not an Option

View The Plan

Week 1 of FatDog 120 training started April 6. By Thursday I was in Langley.

I had the privilege of launching our latest Connect’d Men chapter in British Columbia. The reality of the work I do is that I travel a fair bit and I don’t get to schedule my life around my training plan. I schedule my training plan around my life, or I don’t train at all. I’ve been doing this long enough to know that.

I’ve built out a system that uses AI to analyze my weekly progress, look at where I will be and schedule workouts accordingly. Either Canmore condo gym, full gym (Millenium Place), Hotel gym or a bodyweight workout if no gym available.

What I had on the calendar for Thursday: a bodyweight strength session. Maybe 45 minutes. The kind of thing you can do anywhere. A hotel room, a park, a patch of carpet next to the conference table. I’ve done the template enough times that I don’t need to think about it. No weights required, no equipment, no excuses.

However, I was in BC and the weather was gorgeous. Instead I put on my shoes and went for a run.

10.9 kilometers. 67 minutes. 139 meters of elevation gain. Heart rate held around 154 the whole time, which for me is aerobic, comfortable, honest effort. Langley is flat. No mountains. No drama. Just pavement and the kind of quiet you get when you’re away from home and the rest of your life hasn’t caught up to you yet.

I want to be clear about what happened here: I didn’t do both. I ran, and I skipped the strength session entirely. Not because I was too tired. Not because I didn’t have time. I had an hour, I made a choice, and I went for a run.

That’s not a win. That’s not a failure either. It’s just what happened. And I think being honest about that matters more than pretending the week went perfectly.

The training plan I built for FatDog has a lot of structure in it. 18 weeks, broken into phases. BASE through BUILD through PEAK through TAPER. There are targets for weekly volume, for vertical gain, for strength sessions, for long efforts. When you’re looking at it on a spreadsheet, it looks clean. Tidy. Like something that will unfold exactly as designed.

It won’t.

That’s not cynicism. That’s just how it works. Every training block I’ve ever done, the plan bends. Sometimes a lot. Life does happen in spite of our plans. What I’ve had to figure out, through years of races and missed sessions and plans that didn’t survive contact with real life, is this: the plan is not the thing. The plan is a map. The thing is showing up.

FatDog 120 is 120 miles through the Cascades. August 7th. That’s 18 weeks from right now. 18 weeks is not as long as it sounds when you account for everything that will happen between here and there. I will travel again. I will have hard stretches at work. I will have days where the weather is wrong and days where my legs say not today. Those things are not obstacles to the training. In a real sense, they are the training.

If I only run when conditions are perfect, I’m going to have a very bad time at FatDog 120.

Week 1 finished at 58.1 kilometers. That’s actually a bit over target. The volume felt manageable, which is by design in the BASE phase. I’m not trying to be a hero in April. I’m trying to continue the foundation that lets me be strong in July. The temptation is always to do more, go harder, treat the first week like it’s race week. That temptation is a trap. The first four to six weeks of a training block are supposed to feel like you have more in the tank. That feeling is the point.

That is hard for me.

I want to be straight about the strength work. I got one session in. I needed two. One got missed, not rescheduled, just gone. That’s the thing that actually needs to change going forward. I’ve built so much strength over the winter I need to ensure I maintain that.

Running is easy for me to protect. Running is the thing I will always find a way to do. Strength work is different. It requires more deliberate space in the day. It doesn’t have the same pull. When I’m tired or pressed or in a hotel room with an early flight, running wins. And sometimes that’s fine. But over 18 weeks, if strength work keeps finishing second, I’ll feel it in the back half of FatDog when I need my quads and hips and single-leg stability, and none of it got built in April and May.

So that’s the honest version of Week 1. The running was solid. The strength work needs a better system.

View The Plan

I’m in Canmore this week. Next week I’m traveling again. That’s already two of the first four weeks with travel in the mix. The plan accounts for lighter travel weeks. The plan is good. But the plan doesn’t do the sessions. That’s still on me.

The thing I keep coming back to is simple. The race doesn’t care where you were when you were supposed to be training. FatDog doesn’t have a field on the entry form for “work trip.” The mountain doesn’t adjust. The distance doesn’t change. You either did the work or you didn’t.

That’s not a harsh way to think about it. For me, it’s actually freeing. It removes the negotiation. There’s no internal conversation about whether a given week counts. There’s just: did you show up? Some weeks the answer will be a full yes. Some weeks it’ll be mostly yes. Some weeks it’ll be “I got two thirds of it done, and that was the best version of Thursday I had available.”

Langley was that last one. I made a call. I ran. The strength session didn’t happen.

I’m fine with it. But I’m not pretending it was the plan.

What I’m not willing to do is build a story where the travel was the reason. It wasn’t. I was in Langley, and I still ran 10.9 kilometers on a day when a lot of people would have called it a rest day. The travel wasn’t the problem. The travel was neutral. What I did with it was on me.

That’s the whole thing, really. You can always find a excuse. The flight, the meetings, the unfamiliar city, the fact that you don’t know where the good roads are. Every one of those is real. And none of them are reasons. They’re just conditions.

Week 2 starts now. I’m in Canmore, I have mountains in my backyard, and Ha Ling is waiting if the weather cooperates. No excuses necessary.

They’re not an option anyway.