Why athletes get sick

So I'm sitting around at my desk on Monday afternoon, minding my own business and quietly getting on with my thesis. When from around the corner appears the ILLNESS TRAIN, final destination - MY FACE.

That's how quickly it hit me, I mean I'd had a weird throat/sinusy feeling since early Sunday morning but nothing major. Then in the matter of minutes I went from good to sick, like a punch in the nose.

Luckily I can report that by the time it had settled in on Monday night I was finished my days training, and by the time I woke up today (Wednesday) it had all but departed. Meaning I only had to take 1 sick day, only my 4th of the winter.

All serious athletes suffer from the same few problems. We all train hard, usually throughout the winter months, in the cold and wet. Almost all of us have to be around other normal people, usually all of which are sick. Because we train hard we are tired and our immune systems get fed up, so one day when we get cold enough and wet enough, and some normal person coughs in our face...we get sick.

Then however we just make it worse. Due to our crazy personalities we cannot live without training, so we convince ourselves that regardless of the mad coughing and nose running that we are indeed healthy and in perfectly good shape to train at full steam. As you can imagine though this just makes the problem worse, so at some point we must admit our weakness and take a session off...the horror.

Some of us however are worse than others, because as we almost all push ourselves enough to make the illness worse, some crazy soles then make the mistake of returning to training too soon when the virus/cold/flu/infection is still lingering. That harmless 30minute steady run in the cold is enough to bring that sneaky virus/cold/flu/infection flooding back...in turn making everything worse.

We sure are a weird bunch eh?

Illness avoided. Result.