Running with a Cold
I had been training for over 30 weeks. I was all set to travel to Chicago for my first marathon. Five days before leaving, I caught a bad cold. It was awful. I was really upset because I worked so hard and had a goal time in mind. I started searching the web to see all the ways I could heal from a cold in 5 days. I figured there was no way I could run my best with a severe cold.
Forget about running my best. Negative doubts started to set in and I was wondering if I could run at all. Was it safe? Several articles I read said it was a bad idea to run. A few said that if it’s a cold above the neck it’s ok to run, but below the neck or if I had a fever, not to run. I gave in to the fear and left for Chicago on Friday figuring I would just struggle to finish and not worry at all about how fast I ran. That was really hard, because I like to compete.
In desperation, I started searching the web again on Friday night (two nights before the race.) I found an article entitled, “Don’t Starve a Cold of Exercise.“ This was all I needed. It totally changed my mindset around and freed me up to run hard.
The key paragraphs for me were:
The first question was: Does a cold affect your ability to exercise? To address that, the researchers recruited 24 men and 21 women ages 18 to 29 and of varying levels of fitness who agreed to be deliberately infected with a rhinovirus, which is responsible for about a third of all colds. Another group of 10 young men and women served as controls; they were not infected.
At the start of the study, the investigators tested all of the subjects, assessing their lung functions and exercise capacity. Then a cold virus was dropped into the noses of 45 of the subjects, and all caught head colds. Two days later, when their cold symptoms were at their worst, the subjects exercised by running on treadmills at moderate and intense levels. The researchers reported that having a cold had no effect on either lung function or exercise capacity.
“I was surprised their lung function wasn’t impaired,” Dr. Kaminsky said. “I was surprised their overall exercise performance wasn’t impaired, even though they were reporting feeling fatigued.”
He said he also tested the subjects at different points in the exercise sessions, from moderate to intense effort, and found that their colds had no effect on their metabolic responses.
Holding on to those thoughts and thinking of all the reasons I was running, I ran a 3:39:05 for my first marathon!
So if you’re not feeling well, if you’ve got a common cold, and you need to run, go for it!
