Oct 21 2017
Recovery Row in the Double
I haven’t exercised in a while.
Sigh.
I returned from my business trip to Egypt feeling well and happy that I didn’t get the food poisoning that they had warned me about. On the evening of my return trip, I did a steady state row on the erg, but I stopped after 30 minutes, because Romana came home and I wanted to greet her more than I wanted to exercise.
Then the misery started. The next day, on Friday, I am having lunch with my team and all is well. An hour later, I visit the bathroom and get a nasty surprise. Another hour later, I am not feeling well. Feeling feverish. I decide that I need to drive home as soon as possible. I spend the rest of the day at home, on the couch, under a blanket, feeling miserable. Terrible headache, belly not good, and fever. I did manage to drink 2 liters of disgusting salt/sugar water mix that I made for myself.
Over the course of the weekend there are ups and downs. I am now eating only light food. After every meal I have to lie down for an hour because of belly cramps. I start taking activated charcoal pills. It seems to slowly get better. On Monday, I work from home. On Tuesday, I feel strong enough to go to work. All seems well.
On Wednesday, I am packing to go to Sofia, Bulgaria, but I am on a 45 minutes fine, 15 minutes of terrible cramps interval session. That lasts the entire morning, and I decide to take the chlorine containing pills that claim to clean my intestines leaving the good gut flora alive.
I depart to the airport, telling myself that if things get worse, I can always turn around before boarding and just go home. But this is an important trip.
My situation improves and I make the trip fine.
Friday, I am back, and it’s ups and downs again, but more ups than downs.
Today, Saturday, I even dared to take out a boat and row. I took our double together with my daughter Lenka.
It was a nice autumn morning. I took some pictures:
And the map:
It is good to be back among the living. Now I urgently need to review my training plans because ten days of travel and being sick does have an impact, and I think I should ramp up slowly and carefully.
Mar 2 2019
Starting up after illness
It’s been a long time since I worked out. Here’s the chart that tells the story:
On February 14th, I did a normal 60 minute swim session. Nothing to complain about.
On Friday, February 15th, I was heading to my weights session when I noticed something like an upcoming cold. I don’t need HRV measurements to figure out when to take the intensity back. I am blessed with a pretty good feel for the state of my body. I did, however, decide to press on with the session. A weights session is intensive for the muscles, but in my experience it doesn’t worsen an upcoming cold.
On Saturday, I woke up with a very sore throat and a terrible headache. I canceled my session, thinking that a day of rest and a slow spinning or running session on Sunday would get me over it.
On Sunday, I was worse, and I canceled the light exercise that I had planned.
On Monday, I had a 39 degree fever. I should have stayed in bed, but I moved to the sofa and did my work calls from there. There was a major emergency at work that needed my full attention.
Of course that doesn’t help recovery. On Tuesday and Wednesday, I worked from home, still with a fever. On Thursday, I tried to get to the office, but that was a mistake.
I took the weekend after to get more rest and finally climb out of the valley of misery. On Tuesday, I still wasn’t feeling ready for a workout, and on Wednesday and Thursday I was on a two day work related conference that left me no time to work out.
So, long story short, today was the first day for two short workouts. A 30 minute run followed by a 30 minute workout in the rowing club weights room.
The weights room workout consisted of:
And finally a ten minutes of cooling down on the spinning bike.
The stats are pretty depressing, but it was so good to be active again:
There is also some very good news. The ice on our lake is retreating fast:
Tomorrow, I will do a group erg session with our Masters training group.
On Monday morning, I will fly to Casablanca for a customer visit. I’ve never been to Casablanca, so I am looking forward to it. The following video pretty much sums up what I know about Casablanca, but I expect it to be a bit different:
By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 0 • Tags: illness, rowing, run, trainign, training, weights