Training with a viral infection can be very dangerous. Yes it may hamper your Comrades Marathon training, and potentially your long run; but the risks are not worth it. Hear why from Lindsey Parry on this episode of the Ask Coach Parry podcast.

Transcript

Welcome back onto the Ask Coach Parry podcast, I’m Brad Brown. We’ve got our question today from Patson Ndlovu. Patson is asking Lindsey, let me give you some background, he’s supposed to be doing his long training run this coming weekend. He’s planning on doing a 60km.

He says he’s taking some medication for flu, is it advisable to do the 60km long run on Sunday or should he split up the kilometres over two days? It’s an interesting question, it’s an important one to answer because it could be dangerous running if you’re sick.

Lindsey Parry: Look, particularly if he has actual flu, so if it’s a viral flu infection. Then it’s a bad idea to do any kind of running. The first thing to establish is, is it above the neck or is it below the neck. If it’s just a stuffy nose and head ache, cold-like symptoms; then by the weekend it’s quite conceivable that he’ll actually be fine. Symptom free and he can do his normal run.

Let a viral infection run its course before resuming

If it’s below the neck, if there’s anything in the chest. If there are achy joints, if there’s fever, a bit of hot and cold, like proper flu symptoms. Then he should be taking the medication and resting until he’s completely fine. Then looking at postponing that long last run by a week and doing it five weeks out. That will have very little effect on the overall integrity of the programme.

If he does exercise with a viral infection, it’s either going to get much, much worse or potentially life-threatening. That’s kind of the best advice I can give you on this sort of platform. The other alternative is that I would encourage him to actually see a doctor or at the very least, a pharmacist to advise whether he should be seeing a doctor. To make sure that you do this as safely as possible.

BB: Patson, it’s important, it could be critical, you want to make sure you are 100%. You don’t want to go and do some serious damage and possibly even worse than that. Go check that out, Lindsey, thank you very much for your time once again. Don’t forget, if you’d like to join the Coach Parry online community, the website to get to is coachparry.com/join. Until next time, keep those questions coming. From myself, Brad Brown and Lindsey Parry, it’s cheers.