Staying healthy is the priority

Half training will only make you worse.

You are deep into a training plan and today is a hard interval session. But your throat is sore and you are tired. What should you do?

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The number one goal is to always maintain your health. If you aren’t healthy you can’t train well. And getting properly sick will leave you worse off than a bit of rest.

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With that in mind you have to give some consideration to how you are feeling.

Are you tired because of the heavy training load? That is normal. We want to be tired sometimes. The stress on our body, with some rest, will make us stronger. This is part of what training is about.

Why do you have a sore throat though? Are you getting sick? Add on a heavy fatigue and something probably isn’t right. Should you do your hard interval session?

With the goal of always maintaining our health you are best to err on the side of caution. One option, perhaps the best, is to simply take the day off. Take the time you would have spent training and take a nap, or sleep in. Sleep is the best way to remain healthy. A second option is to do a light spin, pushing your hard interval session out a day. Light means very light, and not more than 45-minutes. If you feel any fatigue the ride is over. In this way you can get a better sense of how you are feeling. And if you are getting sick by the following day you will probably be feeling it fully.

Never feel like you can’t reschedule, or even miss, a training session. Always listen to your body. Pushing through and doing your training, despite poor sensations, can leave you in a worse position. If you do get properly sick, and end up having to take a week off the bike, you are worse off than you would have been had you rested a day or two to maintain your health.