The Crud

For the past couple of weeks....that's TWO WEEKS boys and girls...I've been fighting off some kind of cold, virus, flu, or whatever.  Everybody calls it the more general term of "the crud".  It's been going around where I work and since I usually have contact all day with people through talking, handshakes, or hugs; I  naturally picked up the bug.  I also brought it home to share with my wife, for which she is not at all grateful.  The really hard thing is that it seems to be taking forever to shake this damn thing.  It's mostly respiratory.  I'll feel horrible one day.  Feel better the next few.  Relapse to coughing and sneezing.  Just sick enough to feel like shit but not enough to take off several days from work (gotta eat and pay bills).

How does this effect my training?

Pretty much wipes it out.  Lemme paint you a graphic picture.

My sinuses are all clogged up until the inevitable and unpredictable sneeze which blows great big blobs of booger juice on everything within five feet.  Fellow gym goers tend to freak out when I saturate either the equipment or themselves.  A "bless you" doesn't cover something like that. Then there's the coughing.  Going around hacking constantly is also something that will not make you very popular in a gym.  Add to that every bone in your body aches, you are fatigued because you can't sleep very well and are loaded with DayQuil, you're running a fever, and there's that occasional attack of diarrhea.....it's hard to focus on getting that PR on the bench press.     

So yes, I skipped going to the gym.  The problem with being sick when you are within spitting distance from being in your 60s is that you don't recover as easily from colds and flu.  It's kind of a strange hand off; I rarely get sick, certainly much less so than co-workers a third my age who seem to call in sick every other week; but when I do catch a bug, it's like getting hit with the Black Death. 

But I'm feeling pretty good.  Still have a slight cough every once in a while, but I think it's mostly cleared up.  Just in time to pull a couple of long shifts for the weekend.  Then I can hit my training again on Monday and see how much gains have gone down the toilet.  

It's only a failure when you quit.