In the past week, I've been made fully aware of how training and emotional stress leaves you vulnerable to illness.
I just completed my Base 2 mesocycle, where I averaged over 200 miles a week. Little intensity but a lot of volume. Then it hit last Wednesday during the rest week: the beginning of a sore throat. Remembering the last time this happened and my persistence to train through it that made it worse, I got off the bike, determined to get well.
Five days later, I got back on the bike, surprised how long it took to get right again.
When you push your body to its physical and emotional limits, you leave yourself susceptible to illness. That's when proper recovery nutrition can play such a vital role. Still, even if you do everything right following a workout, you can still get sick. And when you do, especially if the illness is at the neck or below, your best course of action is rest and possibly antibiotics.
Here are a few tips that can help you avoid getting a virus when your training volume and/or intensity increases:
1) Following either a high-intensity workout or high-volume workout, limit your interaction with other people. You don't necessarily have to become anti-social, but be careful who you come in contact with. For example, this is not the best time to go to a movie theater, get on an airplane or go to a party.
2) Be careful eating someone else's home-cooked food. For much of the same reasons as above, it's not worth the risk of inviting something foreign into your depressed immune system.
3) If you do any of the above, you might want to consider taking the Airbourne tablets that are becoming popular for cold prevention. I'm not totally sold on these but they won't hurt. Prevention, I believe, is best accomplished by limiting who you come in contact with. Better still, eat nutritious meals and snacks you've prepared that contain antioxidants to help rebuild your immune system.
Fortunately for me, my illness came during a rest week. Still, this will set me back some. If this would've happened during a race week, it would've been disastrous. So, be careful out there and realize that sometimes your most formidable opponent is something you can't see.
