Should You Run When You’re Sick? Consider The ‘Neck Rule’

• Posted: September 16, 2008
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• Author: Shéamus
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• Filed under: Observations, Workouts
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• Tags: Illness, Neck Rule, Running Sick

We’ve all been there. You wake up one day and you feel like hell. The thing is, you had a long run scheduled. What to do, what to do?

Consider the Neck Rule. Essentially, the Neck Rule asks the workout-craving runner to evaluate the severity of their illness, using the neckline as a kind of breaking point. Symptoms above the neck - runny nose, stuffiness, sneezing, headache, etc - don’t pose a risk to the runner continuing their workout. Whereas symptoms below the neck - chest infections, severe muscle or joint ache, diarrhea, and so on - require time off.

However, even if you feel good enough to get out there and run, extra caution is required. The general rule of thumb is to take things easy, reducing your pace to a level that is not going to put too much strain on a body that is already fighting the effects of illness. If you push too hard, even if it feels good at the time, you can make yourself a heck of a lot worse.

I’ve written before on here about how I feel about running when I’m ill. I’ve done it a few times already on my current journey, including as recently as yesterday. I’m a big believer in ‘sweating things out’, and why shouldn’t I be - ninety-nine times out of one hundred it works. At least, for me.

The Neck Rule, however, tells me that I should not have run yesterday. Not with a severely upset stomach. The thing is, I was glad that I ran. I felt better afterwards, both physically and knowing that I had got it done. Indeed, for the rest of the night - and I was awake until about 10am today because I worked my shift - I felt increasingly healthy.

When I got back up at 2pm this afternoon, however, I felt like crap.

Not only was my stomach even more upset, I now had a pretty serious head cold, too. I felt lousy. Really lousy. The Neck Rule doesn’t specify what you should do if you have problems both above and below the neckline, but I can’t imagine the policy is along the lines of, “Oh, go on then - see if you can run it off.”

The thing is, I had to run, both to satisfy the criteria of my ‘run 365′ thing, but also to keep the miles going on my current mini-quest to log 100 miles in a fortnight. As I said previously my plan to accomplish this was to log six days of seven miles and one eight mile day per week. I’d been on track for this over the first two days of this week.

Today, however, I knew things didn’t look good. I was in bed literally five minutes before I put a foot outside the door. I knew I had to take it easy - my plan was to keep a pace of about 8:30 and not to push at all. I felt that an attitude of ‘let’s see how it goes’ was the best policy.

Four miles in, my body had had enough. I was really cold the whole time, which is unusual for me as I’m rarely anything but warm. My nose was streaming constantly and the last quarter of a mile the phrase ‘keep it in, keep it in’ was being repeated endlessly, first in my head and then aloud as I raced back home to the bathroom. This obviously doesn’t make for optimum performance.

I toyed with the idea of then going back ‘out there’ to log another three miles, but I was spent. A very hot bath beckoned. And then I went back to bed, leaving it again literally five minutes before rising to head off to work, where I find myself now.

Splits:

I’ll make up the three miles I’m now short over the rest of this week.

Tomorrow, I look forward to more bed. I’m hoping a good 6-8 hours of solid sleep will get me back on track. It’s very unusual for me to be ill longer than 24 hours - I’m not sure if this says something about the punishment this daily, never-resting routine is putting on me, or if it’s simply a case of bad luck. At the moment I’m assuming the latter. I’m also hopeful that cutting things a bit shorter today have prevented tomorrow from being a lot, lot worse.

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