To train or not to train?

We have had a great week of training! Starting with Fridays triple brick and including Sunday's very hard 54 mile bike ride, Monday's Track workout and Power Workout, Tuesdays Brick and Strength workout. I was starting to feel wiped out. On my run on my Brick on Tuesday I felt that my legs were not recovered and were in need of some rest.

In the midst of this I had something come up that forced me to have a couple of late nights helping out a friend so I only got about 6 hours of sleep a couple of nights in a row including Tuesday night when I was feeling pretty wiped already.

On the plan was a run and swim on Wednesday and I woke up feeling wiped out. So the question is- Should I stick to the plan and do my scheduled training sessions or should I postpone them to tomorrow(when I am supposed to have a day off) and take a day off today instead? How do you know if you are making excuses not to work out or if you truly shouldn't bother training because you will not get anything out of the session. I always preach quality before quantity so if your training session is not going to be a high quality session because you haven't recovered and haven't got sleep are you better off skipping it? There is no sense in doing it just to do it and have a crappy session that will teach your body how to perform crappy, right?

I decided to listen to my body and swap my day off and take it on Wednesday. This way I still got all of my workouts in for the week but I knew if I got a good nights sleep on Wednesday night and had a restful day I would have much better training sessions on Thursday than I would have had on Wednesday.

This worked out perfectly, I woke up feeling refreshed and recovered and had a great run this morning and then a record swim(I timed my mile swim and got 32 minutes, last time I timed it I got 35 minutes). I was glad I swapped days. I am going to bed early tonight to get at least 8 hours of sleep again going into the weekend which is packed full of hard training sessions again and I want to be ready for it!

It is hard sometimes to know if you are just being lazy and justifying taking an extra day off or if you really need it and really should not work out that day.