My wakeup heart rate was 55, and I felt pretty good. However, as soon as I started running, I could tell I was tired. There was a 10 mph headwind, and I thought that might be causing me to be tired. I slowed down and ran for shorter distances before I walked. I was looking forward to having a tailwind after I turned around, but after I had gone about half a mile, the tailwind stopped. Oh well, I thought, at least it isn't a headwind. On the way back I took several rest breaks of about a minute each.
During my return, my nose started to drip, and I realized I was coming down with a cold. I've been thinking about possible reasons why I might be coming down with a cold. I haven't been exposed to someone with a cold, and I've been sleeping very good. Colds are one of the symptoms of over doing it, and my guess is that is the cause of my cold. Two days ago I ran against the strongest headwind I've experienced in 38 years of running, and that effort likely put a lot of stress on my body.
In addition, I've been adding stress to my body in two ways: increasing my total distance and increasing the amount of running before I walk. I've been adding 0.5 miles to my total distance every couple of weeks, and I'm going to just increase my distance once a month. This will allow my body to adapt more to the increases in distance. I've been adding 1 left-foot-step to my running before I walk. I had gotten up to 90 seconds of running, and I'm going to drop back to 75 seconds and hold that value constant until I stop adding to my total distance. In other words, I'm going to allow more time for my body to adapt to increases in stress. When I was younger, I could handle stress better, but I'm older and have to treat my body accordingly.
The weather today was almost perfect for running: temperature in the low 60s (F) and lots of sun. The rest of the week will be colder, cloudy, and rain showers in the day and snow showers at night.
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