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.

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