Coming Back After Being Sick

I just spent the better part of two weeks being sick. This included Christmas week and New Year’s week. It was the worst cough and cold I’ve had in a long time and the symptoms just took forever to subside. This cough alternated being a dry cough and a “productive” cough, and I found myself having coughing fits that I couldn’t control. I also had trouble sleeping because I would wake myself up coughing. I was not well-rested for most of the time I was sick, and I didn’t do much exercise other than my 1 mile per day streak. Some days I ran the mile, other days I walked it. Then New Year's Day brought the conclusion of the holiday running streak. On January 2nd I had no scheduled training workouts, so I took a real, planned rest day.

I'll take it

By January 3-4, a weekend of planned training, I just didn’t care. I was feeling a lot better, but the cough had beat me down mentally. I did not stick to my training for those two days. In reality, I probably wasn’t ready for the originally scheduled workouts (a 12 mile run on Saturday, and 70 minutes of cross-training on Sunday), but I could have at least done SOMETHING. I did nothing. I relaxed, regrouped, took care of myself, and read a book. And now it’s Monday, a planned rest day, so I will take this day to assess how far I’ve slipped during the illness, and I’ll readjust the training plan as necessary. As this is scheduled to be a somewhat easy week, I think I’ll be OK if I just go with the plan:

Monday: Rest
Tuesday: 5 miles easy
Wednesday: Bike 40 minutes
Thursday: 5 miles easy
Friday: Rest
Saturday: 9 miles easy
Sunday: Cross-train 70 minutes
 
I’m not worried about the run days since they are all easy days. The 9 miles will be my longest run since my marathon on December 7th, but it will be fine if I don’t push too hard. As for the bike day: my plan has been to use the recumbent bike in my apartment building’s fitness center, but it’s been broken for several weeks. If they still have not fixed it, I’ll do a combination of the elliptical machine and walking. I don’t like the elliptical machine because of the constant downward pressure on my feet, so I won’t use it for the full 40 minutes. On Sunday, my cross-training will be somewhat easy, including yoga and some strength training. I’m not going to push it with heavy cardio.
 
That big medal on the left will be mine in Nassau!
I have a marathon on January 18th in the Bahamas. I know I’ll be able to finish it, but I probably won’t do as well as I would have if I hadn’t gotten so sick. That’s not too big of a deal, because this is not a goal race. But my goal races are coming up at the end of April and May, and I hope I can recover well enough to get to that PR at Newport Marathon, my 50th state marathon in Oregon on May 30th.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

2019 Hong Kong Marathon Race Report

Image
I registered for the Hong Kong Marathon  on a whim. I was already going to Asia to attend my friend Christine’s wedding in Thailand and then run the Tokyo Marathon the following weekend. My friend Dave posted on Facebook about the Hong Kong Marathon, which was a week before the wedding. I entered the lottery not expecting to be selected, but I was. It was going to be a two-country-marathon adventure.  It’s the year of the pig (or boar) and we got this medallion in our race packet.  I was woefully under-prepared for the Hong Kong Marathon. My training suffered through the winter, but knowing I had a 6-hour time limit for the marathon, I wasn’t terribly worried - until I got sick. At the end of January I caught a severe cold that I’m still not fully over, three weeks later. I was weak, slept little, and worked out zero times in all of February. But the Asia trip was coming anyway, and being a realist, I gave myself permission to DNS (did not start) or DNF (did n...
Read more

2017 Hefei International Marathon Race Report

Image
Most of my regular followers will know that I was selected as part of a team of five to represent Columbus, Ohio at the marathon of our sister city Hefei, China. I blogged about the announcement here and here , and about my team's fundraiser here . On November 8, 2017, we set off to the Far East, arriving in Hefei, China late evening on November 9th. We spent five days in Hefei, after which everyone went separate directions. My travels took me to Bangkok, Thailand, and then back to China to spend time in and around Beijing. But this post is about Hefei and the marathon I ran there. Post marathon with Courtney, Bernard, me, Echo and Lily in back The Hefei International Marathon is a large event, with tens of thousands of participants across all race distances (marathon, half marathon, 5K and 10K). The marathon had the smallest race field of all events, but included some very competitive elite runners. The Lead-Up Through the sister city marathon exchange, our team o...
Read more

2018 Running Recap

Image
I haven't blogged all year. In fact, I didn't even finish my 2017 race reports. What happened? I still ran. In fact, I ran several races, and did meet some of my annual running goals. But I also focused on other areas of my life that needed attention. I dropped the ball on some things, and I missed some of my other running goals. Right now I'm not going to write new running goals, because I'm not ready. I will, however, state one broad goal, and that is this: I will post a running-related story once per month in 2019. So, here's the 2018 recap: My 2018 Goals I will lead the 11:00 pace group for CWRC. CWRC is the Columbus Westside Running Club , which I joined after moving to Columbus, and this goal was about the winter/spring training program leading up to spring races. I started this, but I didn't finish. Very early on it became clear to me that I was not in the game mentally and not prepared to lead others on a weekly basis. A January training run ...
Read more