Self care: handling being sick

Getting sick is never fun. And even less so when you are trying to train and prepare for an event. How do you manage your training when you get sick?

There are two parts to this discussion. The first is what to do with your training when you are actually sick. The second is what to do once you start to train again.

Typically when athletes get sick they are worried about losing their fitness. This drives them to keep training, sort of. Part of the problem is our lack of honesty with ourselves that we are indeed getting sick. In the hope that we are just tired we continue to half-train. When even an easy 45-minutes spin leaves you tired, it is time to pull the plug. When you feel the first indications of getting sick - fatigue, a drop in your wattage, a high heart rate - would be the time to stop and limit the damage that getting sick will do to your fitness.

Limiting how sick you get, and then regaining your health, is the #1 priority: half-training keeps you half-sick. When you get sick you need to take a break from the training. Those sort-of-easy rides that you try and do when getting sick are just prolonging your time away from real training.

Half-training will only prolong your sickness, increasing the negative impact on your fitness. Sickness that could have been overcome in a few days by stopping to train and taking it easy turns into something that lingers for two weeks.

How do you start training again once you are “healthy”? The biggest mistake is that people try to jump right back into their training - they feel that they have to make up for lost time and try and pick up where they left off, or maybe even try to train harder. They may feel like they are healthy, but they aren’t ready to train hard again. What happens is that they jump back into their training, do it for a week, and then ten days later find themselves sick once again. Often riders get into this cycle of sickness, training again too soon, and then getting sick again. That is a good way to ruin your season of riding.

Pro tip:

For every day you have been sick you want to ride one day easy once you are healthy. It seems like a crazy amount of recovery, but it does ensure you don’t get into a negative cycle of sickness and half-training. Be honest with yourself. If you are riding and start to feel tired stop that ride, don’t push through, as you aren’t ready to train yet.

An easy ride means some endurance. In these rides you can do more than just ride steady. You can do some cadence work (careful on the heart rate here). You can try riding at a higher cadence than you normally would on an endurance ride, say around 95rpm. Or you can mix it up and cycle through a variety of cadences to keep the ride interesting. The main thing is to keep it easier than you think you need to. Then when you do start training again you are truly ready to start and won’t fall ill again.

Once you get sick make your focus getting healthy again, not half training. Then when you get healthy don’t rush back into training. Be patient, and look at your training over the course of your season when recovering from sickness. Getting back to training the right way will ensure your season is a success despite having fallen ill.