Came down with BAD food poisoning from something I ate for dinner Wednesday night. Started feeling crappy by the time I went to bed, felt truly bad all day Thursday (heavy nausea, headache, achy joints - missed first day of work due to sickness in a decade),spent Thursday night vomiting, then spent Friday lying around feeling slightly better and today slightly better than that (headache, joint pain, nauseau gone, just have a very, very quivery stomach) but I still could not jog down the street for a million dollars. Supposed to be leaving Tuesday morning for Penticton. Sad/ironic part (read: part that is really pissing me off) is training went so perfect for months right down to Wednesday night swim session and I felt like I was in best shape of my life.
Looking for any advice on how to better accelerate the recovery process and/or insight from anyone else who has dealt with something similar and then raced an ironman.
Sorry to hear about the rough luck. Perfect, nope, but at least it happened well before IMC and you should be back to good health by race day. The training will still be in you if you can get back to 100% health which it sounds like you can by your recovery. I am not a doc so I won’t say much about how to recover faster.
Just do what you can for workouts, no need to rush things. IF it is 10minutes, it is 10 minutes. Then get back on your schedule when you feel normal again. You still may need a little more rest/sleep when you start working out again but you will feel brand new come race day.
I honestly don’t think your race performance will suffer (as long as you can get your confidence back).
With all the training I’m sure you’ve been doing you might recover from this illness faster than you think. I did the half GFT a couple years ago. Three days before the race I drove down alone with a fever of 101. I skipped checking the bike course and all other activities other than drinking lots of fluids. My fever broke the night before the race so I decided it was time to get it on! That attitude lasted through the swim and up Sugarloaf Mountain. Then I puked all over the place took a 15 minute break and finished the race in 8:05(I was expecting around 6hrs.). I think if you keep hydrating and resting you will be able to finish. But instead of trying for a specific time just try to read your body and how much effort feels OK.
Cameron brown add the same but 4 days before ironman new zealand 07 and had is first real meal only36h before the race… oh…and he won! just rest and eat whatever feel rights…dont rush anything, you wont lose fitness at this point and you are forcing yourself to recover even more than usualy and it can only be good for you!
That’s because you are in the best shape of your life. Being sick for a few days won’t change that hardly at all once you have recovered.
It sounds like you are recovering well and should be whole again in a couple of days. (?) If so, recognize that your planned workouts that you have missed in the last few days and in the next couple of days were not going to affect your race morning fitness that much, so don’t sweat missing them. Rest, recover, when healthy resume whatever race week workouts are appropriate and race well. Don’t cram in the missed workouts and don’t prolong your recovery time by working out when your body is coping with the stress of healing itself. And I would guess that if you are unsure whether or not your body is ready for a workout of a particular duration or intensity, you should err on the side of caution. I would be very careful with any intensity work at all until I was sure that my body had fully recovered.
I’m also doing IMC and I missed some workouts this week due to a bad cold but my main thought was to be glad that the cold will come and go well before race day. Be glad it was last wednesday you got sick, not this coming wednesday.
I did this back in May. One of my colleagues gave me some ginger Gravol which really helped to get back to eating real food. That was the biggest issue for training - catching up on my 4 day calorie deficit.
Firing out of both ends can cause you to get depleted pretty quickly… Hydrate, electrolate (new word) and maybe pop a multi vitamin. Make sure you get adequate rest, and do everything you can to control your mental state - that’s the only thing at risk now, your fitness for the race being complete.
Take any workouts you do very, very easliy. Or skip them entirely. The only thing that workouts the week of the race can really do to you is give you a chance to get hurt. All the important training happened over the past six months. Nothing you can do or not do that would make it better now.
As for the food poisoning, the key thing is to get/keep yourself hydrated enough and having enough electrolytes getting into you that you don’t end up with bad muscle cramp. Lots of sports drink and as much other easily digestable high electrolyte carbs as you can stand.
The times I’ve gotten bad food poisoning, as long as I don’t cramp up, I recover pretty quickly. Muscle cramps for me add another 2-3 days to the recovery process.
I think you’ll be surprised as how well you do end up doing.
Dude, don’t sweat it. You’ll be fine. I was running a fever for Tue-Wed-Thu-Fri before Ironman LP and by Saturday I finally “sweated” it off and put down a PB on race day. Getting sick during the taper is not totally uncommon. I have no evidence, but I think with drastically reduced training, sometimes our daily equilibrium and hormonal balance goes of track and we can more easily react to bad things. I think the daily high volume training might actually trigger a “high effort recovery” by your body and immune system (just a wild guess). When you don’t beat up your body that hard during taper, I think the “recovery part” is not as intense and perhaps we don’t beat back bugs like in our daily “Superman” mode.
Trust your training, you’ll fly at IMC…bike ride starts after the out and back…run starts on the return along Skaha lake…till those points, save your legs and fuel!
Thanks alot to everyone for the positive words, it has really helped never having been through this particular issue before. My major concerns at this point are:
-This has been a real trauma to my gastrointestinal system - I still can’t eat alot of things. Given how hard IM is on the GI tract, I am worried that while I may have not lost much fitness, my GI tract is weakened in a way that it won’t be ready for what awaits next Sunday. Any thoughts or experience here? Anything I can really do about it?
-Weight Loss. This is less of an issue, but I lost about 9lbs I didn’t have to lose over last 3 days which has left me about as weak as a 7 year old. Once I can start eating regularly should I look to put back on all the weight lost?
Not Food Poisoning, but came down with a sore throat last Tuesday nite, which moved to the nose and sinus then to chest conjestion. Was able to ride my bike 22 miles on Friday. But now it’s Sunday morning and I have a tickle in my lungs and some coughs. Mentally taking a hit worrying about loss of training (even though it’s taper time).
One week to feel normal and breath with out hacking.
I think you will be fine for the race, just get the water back in and eat what you are hungry for (your body knows best what he needs now). I revovered quickly with a little help of honey-ginger tea - just use some fresh ginger and pour lots of honey with some boiled water over it. gives you some strength / carbs while you cant eat.
Cameron brown add the same but 4 days before ironman new zealand 07 and had is first real meal only36h before the race… oh…and he won! just rest and eat whatever feel rights…dont rush anything, you wont lose fitness at this point and you are forcing yourself to recover even more than usualy and it can only be good for you!
I heard that as well. Didn’t he say his first meal after feeling better was a big McDonald’s happy meal…less that a few days before the race. Nice!! I think that interview is on Ironman talk or competitor radio.