The effects of a cold on athletic performance

Indoor trainers provide a really great way to analyze the effects of a given environmental parameter without all of the fuss of the environment itself changing. Last Saturday I had an indoor trainer workout.  The exact same workout I did just 3 days prior on Wednesday.  Given my bike was on a trainer in my living room, it was easy to compare workouts.  Heck – I even watched CSI (Miami) on the TiVo (well…technically on the Microsoft Windows Vista Media Center) for both of them – thereby also reducing differences (if I had watched Americas Next Top Model and then CSI, they clearly wouldn’t be valid comparisons).  Anyway…the only difference was one I had a very slight cold and the other I didn’t.

You may remember the last time I did some quick and dirty comparison around the effects of alcohol – this time however I was able to remove virtually every potential test changing variable except time of day (noon vs 5PM) – however as you’ll see, that isn’t anywhere near enough to account for the massive differences.

But back to being sick…So late last week I started to get a very slight cold – just a stuffy nose, but otherwise no issues.  It didn’t appear to affect my track workout on Thursday, however my swim on Friday was a touch bit weird as it was if I had a slightly reduced breathing capacity.  Just to point out though – my life carried on as normal, I wasn’t bed ridden or anything else.  Just an annoying stuffed up head.  I don’t get sick a lot – perhaps once a year, and this would be about ‘as bad as it gets’.

So what’d things look like on the trainer?

October 1st – “Healthy” (snippet):

Avg Power for section: 242 watts (upper yellow line on chart)
Avg Heart Rate: 138bpm (not even Z2 for me – upper red line on chart)

October 4th – “Not Healthy”:

Avg Power for section: 191 watts
Avg Heart Rate: 145bpm (middle Z2 for me)

So what does this mean?  Well, it means what we all probably already knew – being sick makes your performance suck.  How much suckage?  In my case – 21% loss in power while also increasing HR by 7BPM.

If you look at the entire 59 minute workout, then my overall power is reduced by almost 25%.  Yes, basically a quarter of my cycling power is lost.  Doh!

(October 1st on left, October 4th on right)

So anyway, we’ll keep this short.  I just found it interesting, that’s all.  Of course, because I generally ignore semi-logical advice – I still ended up running 20 miles the next day.

Have a good weekend everyone!  And yup, I have the Garmin Forerunner 405 write-up planned for Sunday night sometime, based on the results of the vote last week.  And then I’ll do the rest of the products at one per week in the order they were voted on (see the little results gadget on the right hand column).  Oh, and I’m off to Dallas next week too – and I was just starting to enjoy the nice cool weather up here!

FOUND THIS POST USEFUL? SUPPORT THE SITE!

Hopefully, you found this post useful. The website is really a labor of love, so please consider becoming a DC RAINMAKER Supporter. This gets you an ad-free experience, and access to our (mostly) bi-monthly behind-the-scenes video series of “Shed Talkin’”.

Support DCRainMaker - Shop on Amazon

Otherwise, perhaps consider using the below link if shopping on Amazon. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. It doesn’t cost you anything extra, but your purchases help support this website a lot. It could simply be buying toilet paper, or this pizza oven we use and love.