Ah, the winter cold. How do you judge the line between eyes and nose streaming but fine to run, or actually coming down with something worse, and should rest? I believe it was our own wise dispenser of advice Annalisa Barbieri who once told me “if it’s just your head, it’s fine. Anything in throat or below, rest.” So, on that principle, I took my cold for a 15 mile run yesterday. Then again she probably was talking about a spot of light exercise, rather than a 15 mile slog in the cold. My immune system certainly wasn’t impressed. Mantra for the run was definitely “if it doesn’t kill you, it makes you stronger.”
Saturday’s track session (5 x 1600m, then 4 x 200m) had also been a fairly tough one, though it got better after a sudden snow shower in the first rep made it rather tricky to actually see anything. But after the long run on Sunday I did take to my bed for the afternoon, with zinc, oranges and tea for company.
So what’s your dividing line? How do you work out whether a run might actually make you feel better, or when it’s time to rest? I don’t, of course, mean proper illness: if you have a temperature, if you feel too ill to get up: rest rest rest. But a cold? Marathon training – as I am – probably makes you more susceptible to them anyway, so there’s bound to be one or two you just have to slog your way through, right?
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