Last week was week 1 of training. And I completed exactly 1 day of the schedule.
Why? Because I went to the gym to walk/run my 35 minutes, like a good doobie does and caught a cold. The kind of cold where if I were a 2 year-old I’d have snot running from my nose to my mouth continually with crusts on the edges. Red, watery and puffy eyes and sinuses tender to the touch.
Now, I’ll admit that I wasn’t sick on Tuesday and that by rights I should have done 45-60 minutes of cross-training. But I procrastinated that until the evening and then had an unexpected visitor stop over just after supper and stay until I needed to go to bed. She just sat there. Watching TV with me while I actually thought about ways to say “Hey, I’ve got to get some crunches and some push-ups done. Can you leave now?” But having never having had a thought like that cross my mind before I let it pass, unspoken.
In the middle of Tuesday night I woke with the bad of my throat feeling like it was being sliced by a not very sharp fillet knife. Wednesday I croaked through choir rehearsal and by Thursday I was bumming Dayquil off the cube-dwellers near me. They were happy to hand it over and followed me out of their territory with Lysol and anti-bacterial wipes. Whatever. My run/walking was confined to the skyways scouting for something to eat that wouldn’t hurt to swallow.
Friday, I worked from home. And by that I mean I worked from bed. And by that I mean I did as little as possible. Including not cross-training.
Saturday supposed to be the first endurance run. 3 miles, which if I had done the rest of the week seems like it would have been a logical stretch of endurance both mentally and physically. My stretch was spending the day dozing on the couch instead of in the bed.
I gave it all up freely in part because I felt like crap and in part because I knew that GS and I had designed this training schedule by repeating each of the first three weeks of prescribed training. So I basically am starting over again this week. And that’s OK.
Over the years I’ve read or heard many arguments for training while sick or not training while sick. All of which I ignored because I never thought I’d be in the situation where I’d need the information.
Last week, I just listened to my body. It’s early on in this process and it could very well be that later on I’ll feel like a good brisk walk/run is just what I want to be doing with my snotty headed self. But this time, I was for the couch and the bed and nothing else.
Today, I’m feeling a lot better, although the secretions in the back of my throat are still plentiful and make me wonder at the wisdom of my plan, but I do plan on resuming my training today. So 35 minutes of run/walking over lunch, here I come.
