Training: Coaxing the bear out of its cave, getting bitten

When do you push through the pain and when do you stop and let yourself heal? Always a tough issue for an endurance athlete. I came down with what seemed to be a mild cold early this week. I felt congested and crappy in the morning and evening, but during the day, I was able to limp along with a light cough. Sometimes with colds, a hard workout can make me feel better. It seems to blow out all the gunk and speed up the recovery process. But sometimes it makes things worse, intensifies the symptoms. On Thursday, at quitting time at work, I sat at my desk debating whether I should change into my training gear and do the five-mile run home. A gambling man by nature, I decided to push things, call the cold’s bluff, coax this bear out of its cave so I can see what I’m dealing with.

With temps in the low 30s and light rain falling, I set off on the run and felt great. Kicking in the last mile, I set a PR by about 30 seconds. But as soon as I stopped, my head felt like someone had attached a hose to it and was pumping it full of gluey fluid. Dizziness started to set in. I began hacking up tons of lung butter. The coughing became uncontrollable as I walked the two blocks to my home. After taking a hot shower, I started feeling better, but I felt wiped out after dinner and spent the rest of the evening on the sofa watching TV like a zombie. At bedtime, I somehow fell asleep in between bouts of hacking, but I woke up coughing at 3:30 a.m. and did something I rarely do – take a shot of cough syrup. I usually don’t medicate a cold/cough because I think it just masks the symptoms, prevents me from having a good sense of how the illness is developing. But I knew there was no way I’d get back to sleep without some medicine.

When my alarm went off, I felt woozy, completely wiped out. It was extremely apparent that my run the day before got the bear way out of its cave. And it had taken a few big bites out of me. I spent the rest of the day in bed. I’m not sure what I learned from this. Sure, I could have taken the safe route and skipped the workout. But then again, I would have been left wondering if the run would have left me feeling better, like it has many times before.