We all have goals, but often with the amount of training we do, our immune system takes a pounding. On this episode of the Ask Coach Parry podcast; Lindsey gives advice on why we often get into these cycles of illness, and more importantly how to ease back into your training after them.

Welcome onto this edition of the Ask Coach Parry podcast, I’m Brad Brown, it’s good to have you with us. Thanks for joining us today. Lindsey Parry with us and Lindsey, a question in from Jean Theron today. Jean is saying: I’ve entered my first Comrades Marathon, 2016, and running has always been my choice of exercise. Started getting back into it about a year ago.

Since April this year, have done three half marathons. In the last five weeks though, I’ve hit rock bottom. My immune system has taken a beating and I’ve had three weeks of flu, followed by gastro followed by more flu, mostly in the head with sinus. I’ve run in-between but feeling better now, including a half and a 20km training run in there as well, then gone back to being sick.

I’ve now taken two weeks off and I’m easy back to training, short and slow. My questions are: How do I stay healthy after recovery? I never used to get sick, now seem to be very susceptible. Two, how do I get back on track to train for my first marathon. She’s aiming at the South Coast Marathon on the 18th of October.

Caught in the common cycle of training illness

Lindsey Parry: 18th of October is pretty close. You’ve gotten into a fairly common cycle. When you’ve been sick, your body’s immune system takes a bit of a bashing and when you exercise, there’s a short term suppression of your immune system, but over time the sustained exercise actually helps to strengthen your immune system until we start training for things like Comrades. Because then we’re always on the edge of over training which means that we are susceptible to getting ill.

Particularly with viruses, they really panel our bodies, it takes us a little bit of time to recover and to get completely healthy and for our immune system to recover fully. Unfortunately the common cycle is to then get back into training and then the training adds a further stress to the immune system and we start picking up secondary infections that are things that were related to the original infection that we got.

If you try and work your way up now to running a marathon in October, you’re more than likely going to get sick again. I would laugh off that marathon in October. You need to look at a marathon either later in the year or early next year. It typically takes about two weeks to fully recover from an illness, particularly if it was a viral illness.

How to ease back into running after a viral infection

At that point, once you’re completely asymptomatic, you can probably start training again, but if it’s inside that two week window, no high intensity running and I would limit my runs to 30-40 minutes of very easy running and then post two weeks, I would then take two weeks to build myself back up to the level of training that I was at when I was sick.

You’ve had a much longer term illness with stop-start, stop-start, so you haven’t just had the illness and then the two weeks out. I would take even longer, I would take between 3-4 weeks before I got anywhere near the training I was at when I got sick.

That does mean that that marathon is in jeopardy, but if you don’t laugh off the marathon, you’re just going to have a perpetuating cycle of illness. We are moving into summer, which means there should be fewer germs around for you to catch, but I would still just do this properly so that you don’t face being sick for the foreseeable future.

BB: Awesome stuff. Lindsey, thank you very much for that and coming from someone who has also just come off a two week layoff for having a horrible cough, it’s better to get better than to try and push it too soon and get sick again. Feeling fantastic, back on the road, so I’m proper chuffed myself. Lindsey, thank you so much, we’ll chat again next time, cheers.