How to Deal with Sickness

If you are consistently training over the course of multiple years, it is inevitable that you will eventually deal with some kind of illness that throws you out of your normal daily/weekly routine. The main issue that immediately comes up is: How should I adjust my training based on being sick? This can be a difficult situation to deal with for several reasons – you don’t want to slow down the progress you have been making, give up on the routines/habits that you’ve built, or even just because you prefer to train and don’t want to take days off.

Unfortunately for me, I got sick last week and had to deal with all of these questions myself for about a week. Being 6 weeks out from my next big race, this was obviously not an ideal situation, but I think it is important to separate your feelings from what is best for you in the long term in these situations. While easier said than done, here are some of the core principles that I follow when it comes to illness. These are obviously just guidelines and should be used to supplement how you are feeling but, in general, these are fairly universal concepts:

1. If your symptoms are above the neck, you can train through them at a reduced intensity – this typically means staying in zone 2
   • These symptoms can be a runny nose, headache, shallow cough, sneezing
   • This only applies if you are still feeling generally fine – these symptoms don’t tend to be the type that keep you in bed and out of work
2. If your symptoms are in the neck or below, avoid training until your symptoms have completely cleared
   • This includes things like sore throat, chest congestion, fever, muscle aches, deep cough
   • With these types of symptoms, your body is simply unable to recover and build upon any training that you do – you won’t improve as a result of anything you do during this time, so your best course of action is to rest and get better as quickly as possible

Last week, I ended up developing a fever, muscle aches, and some chest congestion on Monday night going into Tuesday. Considering that these symptoms are in category 2 in the above guidelines, I shut it down starting Tuesday morning until I could clear those symptoms. From there, my goal for the week had shifted entirely from my normal training related goals to getting over whatever I was dealing with. Largely, that means sleeping as much as possible, though it also comes with some patience to make sure that I didn’t try to jump back into training before my body was ready – doing this too quickly could easily backtrack your recovery and end up extending your sickness. For me, my fever and aches cleared up after a few days, though I wasn’t quite able to get rid of the chest congestion/cough that I had picked up. Even though I was feeling a lot better, I decided to wait these symptoms out, which unfortunately took me out for 4 full days.

After finally clearing your last symptom, the last step is to ease back into your routine. It may take a couple of days before your performance comes all the way back, but it will come back. For me, this meant 3 days of staying in zone 2 and gradually building up total volume – going from 1 hour on day one to 1.5 and 2 on the following days. After that, I finally felt like I was back to 100% and fully resumed my training program on day 4. In total, this was a 7-day disruption to my original plan.

As frustrating as that may be, your hard-earned fitness takes longer to leave you than one might suspect. As a reference, I included a chart below that gives high level results from a couple of studies on this topic. Looking at the chart, you really don’t see a significant decline start to occur until after about the 14-day mark. While this chart is obviously not a perfect depiction of what happens when you take some time away, I find it reassuring to recognize that even an entire week out of training will make a negligible difference in the long run.