Get Sick Once?

…that’s a bummer. Get sick twice? Well, that’s just a shame.

I recently mentioned that the month of April wasn’t ideal from a training perspective because I got caught up by sickness. Food poisoning turned to a head cold where I was just not myself for weeks on end.

Dealing with being sick isn’t something anyone wants. Conveniently (if that’s the word) for me, it’s also something with which I don’t contend more than once every let’s say five or six years. So when I was ravaged late last week by another heavy round of nausea, that was crappy. Yes, pun intended.

When I took to social media with an update, lots of folks reached out with their ideas as to why I got sick a second time while others offered suggestions on how to mitigate it in the future. Appresh.

We live in a pretty terrific time to blame Covid, so let’s start there. Damn Covid!

Given the delicate topic here, I’ll spare you the details, but here’s the timeline from last week. On Wednesday evening, I attended a baby shower. I ate the food and saw the people and it was lovely. I rode a pretty massive 7 hour day on Thursday. I started feeling crummy on Friday night. I wasn’t yet nauseous, just had an upset stomach and my body felt hot like a pancake. I still went ahead and woke up super duper early to ride our local Saturday morning gravel ripper although, punch line: I found it a miracle that I finished. Every time we hit an intersection, I planned to turn off towards home to fight another day. But the weather was magnificent and it was my first opportunity of the year, so I leapt (lethargically) at it.

In any event, I finished, came home, then spent most of the afternoon horizontal, which is about as atypical as it gets for me on any afternoon. That was followed by vomiting Saturday evening so off I went to bed. I rarely sleep 8 hours so 6pm to 6am is a pretty thorough night of sleep for me.

Sunday morning I felt better, but still a bit on fire and now Monday and Tuesday I’ve been able to move, spin the legs, and haven’t had an upsetting trip to the bathroom.

You’ve likely heard me wax on as to why I like my WHOOP and how well it tracks “how I feel” anecdotally corresponding to WHOOP’s recovery score. Here’s the week at a glance, Wednesday through Tuesday. It’s sort of a reverse bell curve, feeling fine in the green, dipping into the yellow, feeling abysmal Saturday, and on the mend ever since, bringing me up into the green today.

It’s now worth noting that there is a ripping case of Norovirus going around Vermont right now. Three people from Wednesday evening’s shindig have become ill and lots of our friends elsewhere are or have suffered this type of sickness recently. Was it Wednesday evening that got me sick? Could be, but the onset of sickness 48 hours later seems more than a bit delayed.

Thus, the take home lessons are:

a. Damn covid.

b. Food poisoning in a foreign country last month and getting what seems to be Norovirus last week are arguably unrelated with the exception of having a lessened immune system from wearing a mask all the time for the past two years. Ergo, see “a”.

c. Wash your hands.

d. Get a WHOOP to track this stuff, cause it’s fun.

e. See you in Texas at Gravel Locos this weekend!