When the Week Gets Blown Up
Blizzards don’t care about your training plan.
Some weeks the plan holds. You hit Monday or Tuesday’s intervals, get the strength session in on Thursday, show up Saturday or Sunday ready to for the group ride. The structure does what structure is supposed to do.
Then a blizzard shows up.
Not always an actual blizzard — though in my case, it literally was. Two-plus feet of it in spots. The kind where you’re out there battling with the snowblower just trying to reclaim the driveway, and by the time it quits and you’re done your legs are cooked and your lower back reminds you of your age. The ride that was supposed to happen that morning didn’t. Neither did the one the next day. And it snowballs…(sorry)
The blizzard is just the most honest version of what happens to every busy rider eventually. Sometimes it’s a work deadline that runs three days long. A sick kid. Travel. A week that just collapses under the weight of everything else. The calendar that looked manageable on Sunday looks like a joke by Wednesday.
Most riders handle this one of two ways. They try to make it up — cramming two sessions into one day, adding a ride they didn’t plan, turning a recovery spin into something it shouldn’t be. Or they write the week off entirely and call it a loss, which usually bleeds into the next week too.
Neither works.
Here’s what I’ve learned actually works: triage.
Not every part of the week matters equally. When things fall apart, you don’t try to save everything. You protect what’s actually moving the needle and let the rest go without guilt.
For me that hierarchy looks like this, and yes, this might be way more than what you need:
The one hard effort is non-negotiable. Everything else in the week is in service of this. If I get one quality interval session — something that actually pushes the system, either outside or on trainer — the week wasn’t a waste. Reschedule it, shorten it if you have to, but protect it.
Strength is flexible but not optional. It doesn’t have to be a full session. Twenty minutes of focused work counts. Just your main lift? Fine. But skipping it entirely for two or three weeks compounds in ways you feel on the bike.
The group ride feeds something the others don’t. There’s fitness value, sure, but more than that it’s accountability and enjoyment. That matters for longevity. Don’t sacrifice it unless you genuinely have no choice.
Everything else is negotiable. The extra endurance ride, the second strength day, the bonus zone 2 spin — that’s all gravy. When the week gets blown up, those go first and you don’t look back.
The blizzard week for me? A learning experience: Hours of snowblowing and shoveling Monday. It’s not nothing - it’s a workout. Functional strength applied. Got on the Kickr Tuesday once the driveway was clear and the kids were sorted, but it really sucked - hello DOMS - and I should’ve waited a day. Wednesday was the Tuesday lifting session. Thursday an endurance ride on trainer, etc. The week looked nothing like the plan. But the minimum held though I admittedly overstuffed it, feeling worn out by the weekend (for TrainerRoad friends, I triggered a “Yellow Day” easily).
That’s the standard. Not a perfect week. A protected one. Sometimes, a salvaged done.
Being dialed doesn’t mean executing flawlessly when conditions aren’t ideal. It means knowing exactly what to protect when they’re not — and not catastrophizing the rest.
The blizzard doesn’t care about your training plan. But your training plan doesn’t have to care that much about the blizzard either.
What’s your version of the blizzard — the thing that most reliably derails your week? Reply and tell me how you handle it.
— Kevin
