If you have been following my recent diary entries for Women’s Heart Rate Monitor, you will have seen that I recently caught a cold and continued with my training program. You may have wondered if this was a wise thing to do. So let’s take a look at some of the advice that I follow (most of the time – I’m not perfect).

The good news for people that take moderate exercise each day is that studies have found that this appears to minimize illness. Moderate exercise is generally taken to be around thirty minutes per day, and seems to be the most often quoted figure. Anecdotally, many people who exercise regularly feel that they get less illness in general, and recover quicker when they do get ill.

However, it should be borne in mind that harder and longer exercise can make it more likely that you may contract a cold, particularly if you make a sudden increase in your mileage or intensity to a level that your body is not used to. You should use your heart rate monitor to ensure that you do not over-train and that you balance hard training with rest and recovery. Following a long, hard run (e.g. in the latter stages of marathon training) it is best to avoid people that have colds, because the immune system may be suppressed for up to eight hours following the run.

Given that exercise may minimize the likelihood of contracting a cold – it still doesn’t eliminate the risk. The fact is that most of us will suffer some form of cold or respiratory illness in a given year, no matter what precautions we may take. People who run regularly are least likely to want to stop when illness strikes. If a race is looming, many may be tempted to continue training when really they should be resting and allowing their immune system to work at its most efficient.

Now, when the inevitable does happen and you contract a cold or flu, what should you do? Well, for a genuine flu, the simple answer is that you should rest – and frankly you will be unable to do anything else. However, a common cold may not necessarily mean that you need to skip training. The generally accepted rule is that it is okay to run if your cold symptoms are confined above the neck. So, if you have a runny nose, sore throat, mild headache and sneezing, you may run if you want to. Use your heart rate monitor to gauge how fast you should be running. I have found that my heart rate is persistently higher when I have a cold (by as much as ten beats per minute!), which means that I must run slower than usual to achieve my goal for the run.

Regardless of your planned running intensity for the session, you should start out easy to assess how you feel. Don’t ignore signals such as increasing pain in the head, as it would be better to abort the run and get some rest. Personally, I will generally avoid high-intensity training for a day or two if I believe that I can shake-off the cold quicker. Nonetheless, I have made the mistake of continuing on a long run when a cold was waning, only to have it come back with a vengeance.

If the symptoms of your cold are below the neck – such as a deep hacking cough, vomiting, aching muscles, diarrhoea – then you really should not run. It is far better to rest and recover from the illness, rather than run and prolong the illness or even make it worse. There is no rule that says you have to play Russian-Roulette with your life in order to stick to a training schedule. Remind yourself why it is that you are doing this activity in the first place. On your list of reasons, I’ll venture that “so that I can suffer longer and more frequent illness” is not in the top ten.

Unfortunately, it’s true that you will lose endurance very quickly during illness, and the comeback can be quite slow to start with. The danger is that you may throw yourself into hard training too soon, possibly causing a relapse. My advice is to start back with a recovery run, rather than trying to catch-up by recommencing with a hard run. During the run you will almost certainly find yourself running slower at your recovery ceiling. Depending on how severe and prolonged your illness was, you may need to have extra rest days and steer-clear of hard runs for a while. Build up gradually until you are back to full strength. You should find yourself naturally running faster again during each run at the same level of effort. If improvements do not occur, then consider having extra rest. If you missed a week of training due to illness, then you should expect to spend a week or two to build-up to the pre-illness level. I personally find that I need twice as long as the length of training absence in order to fully recover (i.e. two weeks build-up for one week missed training).

Another good use of your heart rate monitor is to take your resting heart rate regularly. When you know your normal resting rate, you will be able to see whether your current resting heart rate is significantly above this level. This can be a useful indicator of illness or over-training.

In summary, if your cold symptoms are above the neck it is okay for your training to proceed with caution. Use your heart rate monitor to check how you are responding to training and adjust your intensity level accordingly. Following an illness, give yourself time to get-back to your pre-illness level. You have a lifetime of running ahead of you – a few days or weeks of rest is a good thing and not something that should be avoided at any cost.

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