The other morning, I found a flat tyre on the van. The next day, it became part of my brick session. Not because I planned it, but because I refused to let it write off two days of training.
BLUF: A disrupted plan is not a ruined day. When circumstances change, look for a sensible way to reshape the plan around reality, not an excuse to abandon it.
Day one: the flat tyre and the early swim
So, firstly, let me set the scene. I woke up early to get my swim session done. On my way out the door, I noticed the van had a flat tyre.
Not ideal. And not something I was going to solve at 6:00 in the morning.
Now, this is the exact moment where a lot of people quietly let the day go. The plan is broken, so the whole thing is off. Swim cancelled. Maybe tomorrow.
Instead, I asked someone if I could borrow their car, got down to the pool, and got the session done.
That is the whole point. The tyre was a problem. The swim was still possible. Those are two different things, and it is worth keeping them separate in your head.
Day two: a garage visit and 2.5 hours of training
The next day was the harder puzzle. The van needed to get to the garage to have the tyre fixed. But I also had a fairly heavy training day: about 2.5 hours across a run and a bike session.
Two jobs. Same window of time. And on paper, they were fighting each other.
So here is what I actually did. I pumped the tyre up as best I could, drove the van to the garage, and then ran home... the run is normally about 30 mins, so I made it into a 45 min run home.
That was the first bit of training taken care of, and I had not lost a minute to the errand. The errand was the training.
The bike session (a very sweaty one)
After getting home, I got on with a bit of work. Then it was time for the bike.
I jumped on for 90 minutes. It was a very sweaty session, which for anyone who knows me is not exactly headline news. But the work got done.
Nothing glamorous here. No perfect conditions. Just a turbo, a bit of graft, and a session ticked off around a normal working day.
Turning the return journey into a brick
Then came the part that made the flat tyre genuinely useful.
I got off the bike, went straight out the door, and used the run back up to the garage to collect the van as a brick session. If you have not done one, a brick is simply running off the back of a bike, and it feels exactly as awkward as it sounds. Heavy legs, a slightly drunk sort of gait for the first ten minutes.
I will be honest about this one. I still had some residual fatigue in my legs from Ironman Kalmar, so it was a hard slog. Near the end I felt myself going a little lightheaded.
So I backed off the effort, kept moving, and got myself to the van safely. That matters. Adapting is not the same as gritting your teeth through something that is telling you to stop.
When I reached the van, I was very happy to dig into my emergency stash of Haribo. Which, as it happens, is a whole other conversation about why I always carry sweets. But that is for another day.
What actually happened here
Let me be clear about what this is and is not.
This is not a story about forcing training at any cost, ignoring your body, and treating every obstacle as a test of hardness. That is not intelligent, and it is a good way to get hurt.
What actually happened is more useful than that. Two annoying, real-life problems landed in my week: a flat tyre, and a garage visit that did not fit neatly around my training. Instead of letting either one cancel a session, I asked a simple question.
How can I make these circumstances work?
Borrowing a car protected the swim. Running to and from the garage covered a chunk of the training and dealt with the errand at the same time. That is it. No magic. Just refusing to accept a false choice between the two.
Consistency is adaptability, not perfection
Here is the key message. Most people think consistency means everything going to plan. It does not, and it never will.
Life gets busy. Vans get flat tyres. Kids get ill, work overruns, the weather turns, the pool is shut. The plan will not go perfectly, so the skill worth building is not more willpower. It is the ability to adapt without automatically abandoning the plan.
Because the people who stay consistent are not the ones with perfect weeks. They are the ones who can look at a messy week and still find a way to get the important work done.
The evidence backs this up too. When researchers looked at what actually builds a lasting habit, the standout finding was that missing the odd day did not meaningfully harm the process of habit formation. What mattered was repetition over time. You can read the original study here: Lally et al. (2010), European Journal of Social Psychology.
So what that means is simple. One disrupted day is not the thing that breaks your progress. Deciding that a disrupted day equals a wasted day is.
How to do this in your own week
Here is what to do when life throws a spanner in the works:
- Separate the problem from the session. The flat tyre and the swim were two different things. Do not let one automatically cancel the other.
- Ask what is still possible. Not what is ideal. What is possible right now, with what you actually have in front of you.
- Combine jobs where you can. Running an errand and getting a session done at the same time is not a compromise, it is a win.
- Adapt the effort, not just the plan. Heavy legs and feeling lightheaded are signals. Backing off is part of doing this intelligently.
- Get something done rather than nothing. A reshaped session beats a skipped one every time.
Better to be consistently good than sporadically great. That is the whole game.
The takeaway
Sometimes the obstacle is the session. A flat tyre could have cost me two days of training. Instead, it became the reason I got a run in on one of them.
The key takeaway is this: do not confuse a disrupted plan with a ruined day. When reality changes, reshape the plan around it and keep moving forward.
If you are the sort of person whose week keeps getting derailed and you are not sure how to keep things going around it, that is exactly the kind of thing I help with. If you have any questions, queries or concerns, don't sit on them, let me know.