Should I run today? The checklist a coach actually uses

Some mornings the question isn’t motivation. You’d run. You just don’t know if you should — the night was short, the legs are heavy, and the plan says intervals like it knows something you don’t.

Here’s the checklist a good coach runs through before answering. It takes two minutes, and you already have most of the data.

The five signals

1. Last night’s sleep. Not your average — last night. Sleep is when adaptation happens; a short night means today’s hard session lands on an unrepaired body. One rough night is survivable. A short night before a quality session is where plans go wrong. Under six hours, treat every “hard” on the calendar as negotiable.

2. Resting heart rate. Measure it against your own baseline, not a chart. A resting heart rate a few beats above your normal is your body saying it’s still working on something — yesterday’s session, a virus, the wine. Two or three beats is a nudge. Five or more is a message.

3. HRV, if you have it. Heart-rate variability is the most sensitive of the three, and the noisiest. Read the trend, never the single number. Below your baseline for a day: note it. Below for several days: your easy days aren’t easy enough. (More on this in HRV for runners, without the mysticism.)

4. What the last two weeks cost. Recovery signals only tell you how the night went. Training load tells you why. Two hard sessions still in your legs mean today’s tempo run isn’t the same run it was on paper. If your last two weeks were much bigger than the month before them, the fatigue is structural, not a bad morning.

5. Pain — the override. Pain is not fatigue. Fatigue is general, symmetric, and fades as you warm up. Pain is specific, one-sided, and gets worse. Fatigue is a training signal. Pain is a stop sign: skip the run and see a professional if it persists. No checklist outranks this one.

The four honest answers

A useful morning decision isn’t run/don’t run. It’s one of four calls:

• Keep it. Signals near baseline, load absorbed, nothing hurts. Run the session as written — this should be most days.
• Trim it. Slightly off, but not wrecked. Same session, less of it: four intervals instead of six, eight kilometres instead of ten. You keep the stimulus and lose the overreach.
• Swap it. Clearly compromised, but able to run. Trade quality for easy kilometres and move the hard session a day or two. The week still adds up; the intervals happen when you can actually hit them.
• Rest. Multiple signals off, or any pain. The fastest thing you can do today is nothing. One skipped session never cost anyone a race — three weeks of forcing it has cost plenty.

The two mistakes

Runners tend to fail this decision in one of two directions.

The first is pushing through everything, because the plan says so. That’s how a tired Tuesday becomes a junk-session Wednesday becomes a skipped Friday. Hard days need a body that can absorb them; on the wrong day, a quality session is just damage with a stopwatch.

The second is resting at every wobble. Training only works because it’s uncomfortable sometimes, and every signal above drifts on ordinary days. That’s why the answer is usually keep or trim — the full stop is for mornings when the evidence stacks up, not for every yellow flag.

The skill is telling those mornings apart. That’s the whole job.

What this looks like in practice

Six hours of sleep, resting heart rate up three, HRV a touch low, a tempo run from Tuesday still in the legs, no pain. The plan says intervals.

The call: swap. Easy eight kilometres today, intervals Thursday. You bank real kilometres, Thursday’s session actually gets hit at pace, and the week ends up worth more than if you’d forced it.

That’s the entire idea behind Faster — it runs this checklist every morning from your actual sleep, heart rate, and training load, makes one call, and tells you why in plain words. Sometimes the call is “not today”. That’s not the app being soft. That’s the app doing its job.

This is training guidance, not medical advice. If something hurts — not aches, hurts — see a professional before you see a start line.