Trees were bending in half, there was so much water running down the side of my house I couldn't see out my windows. Then there was hail.

I was just waiting for the funnel cloud. (And trying to figure out where to take shelter in a house without a basement. Answer: My food pantry.)

Normally thunderstorms don't bother me, but this one had me seriously freaked out...and very glad I wasn't running this morning.

Caitlin wrote a post the other day about the importance of scale back weeks during a training plan.

Last week was supposed to be my week to cut back. I was only supposed to run twice during the week and then have my long run on the weekend.

Instead, I ended up running my normal three times during the week plus my long run. I didn't want to skip the BlogHer 5K in the name of my training plan.


This morning, feeling completely drained mentally and physically, I made the execute decision to make this my scale back week. I could feel the effects of overtraining start to set in and knew I needed that scale back week. So at 5:00 a.m. I shut off my alarm and went back to sleep.

I woke up feeling refreshed and revitalized.

Scale back weeks are built into a training plan for a reason:

• They protect against mental fatigue and training burnout
• They protect against physical fatigue and injury.
• They give your body a chance to adapt to all the training.

Do you build scale back weeks into your training plan? If so, do you honor them?