'Tis the Season: Illness and Training

Introduction

It happens to all of us! We wake up one morning sick or throughout the day get that “ugh, I think I’m coming down with something feeling”. Sometimes our first thought is “but I have a key workout today and I must get it done”! Let us reassure you, unequivocally and without a doubt as coaches, it is okay, and we will navigate through it.

First things first, as soon as you recognize something is off physically as far as illness, please let your coaches know so we can start assisting you! If you do not have a coach, immediately start thinking rest and recovery without regard for training goals … that is a must in our opinion. Do not pass go, do not collect $200!

As multisport athletes our personal approach to training can be detrimental to outcomes. We start a season with a goal, a training plan, and a drive to get it done at all costs. Our wiring at an early age is to ignore signals from the body and be tough in our athletic pursuits. We say things like “suck it up buttercup” or “walk it off”. Therefore, we have workouts on the schedule, and need to check off those boxes. We need to show commitment at all costs to the “plan”. This mentality of checking off the boxes, sacrificing quantity over quality, will often create a sub optimal season, possibly disappointing race performances or worse. Your coaches often spend time trying to prevent you from getting in your own way to create the best setting to meet your goals.

Not All Illnesses Are Created Equal

Illness is an experience we all have in a season from mild colds to more severe infections such as the flu or COVID-19. (Note: while not in the scope of this discussion, confirmed COVID-19 infections should be dealt with differently and may have additional precautions for return to full training) How you deal with illness during training can be a variable that can make or break your season progressions and ultimately, your race day performance. No one gets time bonuses, placement credit or a medal for checking off all the boxes on your training plan on race day. What you do get on race day is an outcome and that outcome is tied directly to making each training day as optimal as possible. Illness makes performance poor, so why would you bother covering the duration of a workout with poor output? You know, just going through the motions. Understanding how to rest and then adjust workouts when sick is the recipe to enhance future performances in training. As coaches, that are also a MD and a Pharm.D., we have additional professional training to get you back on track, safely. Additionally, considering our personal multisport experiences and working with athletes, we have developed some guidelines that we employ to get back to 100% as soon as possible.

The first step is to understand early symptoms and be proactive. An increase in resting heart rate or higher heart rate values, relative to effort during workouts, is the first signal something could be brewing inside of you. Again, if we have not noticed it as coaches … make sure you let us know! We want to react appropriately to these early symptoms, by driving intensity down during prescribed workouts, or just taking a day or two completely off. Our goal at this crucial moment can hopefully ward off a heavier onset of illness and bring you back to health.

If the illness is a head cold, mostly in the nose or sinus area, training can proceed as planned. This means no fever and no sore throat. However, once an illness seems to spread outside of the head cold area, care must be taken to ensure you get back to optimal health before adhering to the prescribed stresses of your training plan. This is when the “checking off the boxes” mentality of the type A athlete must be subdued. This is a critical point in the decision tree!

Navigating an Illness: The S3 Multisport Approach

Once an illness starts to make its way below the neckline, you can cause an increase in the severity of symptoms by continuing to move forward with prescribed training intensities. What can start out as a simple cold, can quickly progress into a more severe illness since you are adding additional stress to the body. Immunity is a complex balance and once we upset that balance too much, the illness sets in. In short order, the body will start to prioritize its functions into fighting the infection, whether viral or bacterial. Again, training will hinder this process greatly so that is why we typically have our athletes immediately stand down from all training. Period. Days spent being smart here it essential to recovery. This is not the time to get “all-knowing” here and try to train through these premises. What could be a 3-5 day blip in your training could turn into 2 weeks of struggling to regain strength and 100% performance. Let us be your governor or if self-coached, just remember less is more at this important moment … be conservative.

We look at illnesses and the return to training based mostly on your subjective data. We like to look at it as a percentage of normal health. If you feel 80-85% normal, or worse, there is no training that is worth doing. You still need to continue to rest and recover. This is always a tough pill to swallow since as athletes we feel that because we are not training as dictated in your training plan we are taking a step backwards in our progression. There is no point, in ever continuing to swim, bike, run if we are not close to optimal health. Moving forward at 85% or less will cause mediocre/poor workout performances. Long term this will have an increase in negative impacts in overall fitness. In our opinion, the efforts to drive performance at this decreased health level are fruitless.

Moving to the next phase, if you are feeling a bit above 85%, we will suggest that we cover the durations of workouts at a VERY low, recovery effort. If you are progressing into the 85-90% range, we will further suggest covering the durations at a Recovery sector and move a little into the Endurance sector. Once we get into the 90-95% range, we can cover workouts at Endurance sectors. At 95-99% health, we can move into Tempo sectors during workouts. Only when you are at 100%, will we allow Threshold or Best Effort workouts again.

As you would suspect, gauging percent health is always a grey area, especially for the upper end type A athlete and the highly motivated athlete. Data from heart rate and/or performance numbers is usually the only way to make the point. As a coach, we typically know when someone is “back”, so it becomes necessary to put forth more specific guidelines for performance outputs during workouts with athletes that are not quite being truthful with their symptoms. The percent is more of a gauge of energy levels, and fuel levels, which is a good indication of where energy is flowing in the body. Is energy still going towards fighting off illness, or going towards muscles for more vigorous activity levels?

At this point, our focus should be limited to 24-hour windows. We must resist the urge to believe how a missed day or days may negatively impact a race that is months down the road. During this 24-hour focus, you need to divert energy into things directly in your control, and not waste energy on things out of your control. Let’s not make a decision today, that will negatively impact your tomorrow. Therefore, the focus should be on diet, hydration, sleep and fueling. When you nail those 4 things, every day, swim/bike/run performance will always fall into place.

Summary

If you get no other take away from this discussion, we believe this is the one that matters! Time dealing with an illness, and not working out is not time off or recovery. Your body is under stress, so there is no need to make up the loss training stress. Depending on the severity of the illness, it could be comparable to stacking numerous Threshold or Best Effort workouts day after day. As coaches, we would never do that, so try to move past the guilt and trust the conservative process. Additionally, the nutritional deficit post illness is significant, so it must be respected and repleted over time. We are convinced that make up workouts will ultimately overdraft the stress budget and generate more liklihood of relapse or even increased risk of additional future illnesses.

The success of your season, and your performance at your A race will be dictated by how you deal with adversity in your daily training. We are only as good as the amount you are able and willing to communicate with your coaches. If illness is a hurdle you need to deal with in your season, be respectful to the needs of your body to get back to prime overall health as quickly as possible. Taking short time periods of no training or adjusting intensities as you deal with a sickness will go a long way to improving the overall quality of your season.

**Thanks to Coach Vinny Johnson who collaborated with me over the years during my triathlon career to fine tune this guidance**