“Nick, can you unlock the sessions, so I can do them on another day and they don’t go red?”
“Nick, there is something going on with the swim sessions? Although I upload the files, they don’t turn green.”
Please... don’t only chase the green lights!
Although I use a famous training platform to plan and send training plans – a platform that is also very useful to see if you trained and how – I DO NOT ADVOCATE that you swap your training motivation from your innermost goals into a chase for green lights.
Yes, I always say that consistency is king. But that does not mean that we have to become fixated on getting green-coloured training sessions on our beloved software. The most important thing is still to get out there (or "in there" if you’re training indoors or swimming) and get the work done. Only you know if you have really done a workout or not. Even when you mark it as "completed" and you may have not, ahem… actually completed it!
Get outside and run. Get to the pool and swim. Don’t faff around and don’t lose time trying to change the colour of a bit of software – we’re already time-crunched and we don’t want to waste more time that we could invest in something else (like going to the cinema or to Taco Bell... or even both!). If you decided to train, train. If you’ve decided to skip training for a good reason or even a “bad reason”, skip the session and move one. Don’t try to squeeze it somewhere else during the week. Just move on.
If, on the other hand, you can’t swim on Tuesday but you can on Wednesday and vice versa (and the change does not affect the overall plan of the week) just do what you can without the looming ghost of a “red window” on your software. If you’ve trained, that's more than enough. JOB DONE! Don’t overthink the colour of your software desktop, just focus on the what you’ve put in in terms of workout. That’s all that matters. Really.
I also was obsessed with the colours of our beloved training software desktop once. In the earlier days (I feel old saying that), if you hadn’t uploaded a session before midnight, the day after you would not have the opportunity to upload it anymore. It could be uploaded only on the day you had synced or plugged in the cord of your smartwatch/bike computer. And that would mean: DOUBLE RED! Yes, double red!!!
Several times I was already in bed, say at 11:30pm, and jumped out of the bedroom and rushing to the computer saying to my girlfriend (now wife: here’s another example of why consistency is always king): “Oh no, I forgot to upload the session again and I only have 30 minutes left.” She didn’t understand and would roll over, ignoring me.
Was it worth it? Hell no, it was stupid: a waste of time, a waste of sleep and a waste of energy. I had done the workout. That was all that mattered.
So, don’t only chase the green lights – chase the training sessions!