When Things Don’t Go As Planned

37 miles.

That’s how many my marathon training plan says I should have run this week.

I’ve run 7.

What do you do when things don’t go as planned?

That’s a question for life in general, for our journey through faith, justice, and spirituality, and definitely the question for week three of my marathon training.

I didn’t plan to go so far off my plan. The week started strong with those 7 miles (technically it was 7.1). I saw a group of deer, made some fun videos, and felt great.

Then the next day our youngest needed to stay home from preschool, sick with some sort of li feting cough and bug. Which meant no post-school-dropoff run for me. (And en evening workshop meant no post-bedtime run either!)

Maybe I’ll get back on schedule the next day, for my weekly long run.

Can you guess what happened? (Or more accurately, what didn’t happen?)

Cough/cold still lingering, no preschool for our youngest, and no morning run for me. (It was also raining all morning so I likely would have skipped sixteen wet miles anyway.)

And then there’s Thursday, which has two healthy kids (hooray) but an extra early meeting (why?!) so no morning run. Again.

I had a great plan. And then it all fell apart.

But when it comes to training for a marathon or your faith and spirituality or life in general, things won’t always go as planned. It seems they rarely do.

The trick is to keep going, to know there’s another week ahead, one week off doesn’t define all the weeks ahead.

We watched Finding Nemo last weekend for our weekly pizza and movie night. And really, this whole rant (ramble?) could be summed up with Dory’s memorable advice: Just keep swimming.

Or in my case, just keep running.

Or in our case, just keep living.

That sounds like a plan we can all aim for.