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Treading Water:
How Not to Ruin Your Season When You Get Sick
It's going to happen to all of us at some point in year. Things are going
well, you're on top of your form and riding strongly, and then it starts:
scratchy throat, stuffy nose, itchy eyes-- that's it, you're sick! Many
riders make the mistake of overtraining (or underresting) to get themselves
vulnerable in the first place, and then don't give themselves enough time
to fully recover from fear of losing fitness. Both approaches are recipes
for an early end to your season. In this article, I'll detail how to prevent
getting run down and susceptible to illness, and how to rescue your season
if it does happen.
If you're getting sick and tired of being sick and tired, the first step
is to pin down why. A heavy workload both on and off the bike without
ample recovery puts more stress on your immune system than your body can
handle. A weakened immune system means your defenses are down leaving
you open to illness. Ideally, you should be keeping a training log where
you not only record the hard data of your workouts, but also information
about your waking pulse, sleeping hours, how you felt on your ride, how
your day at work went, and how you recovered from the previous days workout.
This is where small observations you make about your day can speak volumes
later when viewed in the larger context of your training week and overall
health.
Recognizing overtraining when you keep a training diary can actually be
pretty simple. There are some general rules you should try not to break
to help keep you on top of your form. One is never to train more than
three days hard in a row without taking a very easy recovery day. Another
is not to include more than 2-3 days of anaerobic training in a single
week, and that includes racing. Purely aerobic training often only takes
24 hours to recovery from, but anaerobic work can take 48 hours or more.
Don't be afraid to take as many recovery days as you need after a weekend
of racing; training tired is definitely a shortcut to illness.
What can be harder to pinpoint is the non-cycling stress that can contribute
to the overtraining equation. Training stress is a good thing; it's the
trial you put your body through to force an adaptation and in short, to
get faster. Non-training stress can be equally hard on your body and requires
recovery time, though, and is the part that many riders neglect to consider.
If you've had a difficult day at work, difficulties with a personal relationship,
or maybe spent the day traveling to or from an event, that's the kind
of strain on your body that needs to be accounted for. An all-day drive
home the day after a race is not a recovery day; you need to recover from
the drive itself. Being slightly undertrained and underfit but fresh and
healthy is a more effective approach than overtrained, fit, sick and tired.
If the damage is done and you do find yourself sick, it's important to
try and limit your losses and not make things worse. The biggest mistake
a rider can make is to try and train through sickness to keep from losing
form. The small amount of form you might gain from the training is never
worth the extra days you'll stay sick from splitting your body's energy
between recovery from the training and recovery from the illness.
Normally, I recommend that clients take at least one and normally 2 days
off the bike once a serious cold or similar illness sets in. It's much
more effective to spend that time napping, especially if you're still
going to work during the day. Once their illness has stabilized and isn't
getting worse, I'll allow them to begin to ride a hour easy each day,
mostly as a way to check in with their bodies and see how they're progressing.
The first day they wake up feeling better and get in one of those hour
rides thinking they could have trained, I'll normally allow real, structured
training to begin again the following day. Not the day they feel good,
but the day after, since riders are rarely honest with themselves about
how much recovery they actually need and are usually so anxious to get
going again.
When you do start with structured workouts again, it's important to start
at a level below what you were at when you got sick. Trying to pick up
where you left off is typically more stress than your body can handle,
and might leave you sick once again. Building back up slowly is the most
effective approach. Once you do get back into your routine, you might
find that you feel surprisingly good; often if you've fully recovered
from your illness your immune system is in overdrive, and your training
will go well.
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