If you’re going to catch this pandemic influenza strain you might be interested to know what you’re getting yourself into before-hand. I wouldn’t recommend catching it, but if you do decide that you’re going to get sick and are wondering what it’s going to be like and how long it’s going to take before you’re healthy then take a read.

Day 1:I wake up with an irritated throat. I think that it’s probably due to the fact that our house smells like liquor after my room-mates had a big birthday party here last night and there are in excess of one hundred empty bottles on the dining room table evaporating a disgusting concoction of booze-smells into the air. I have no other indication that I’m not feeling well until about 11am when I start to feel achy in my lower back and am feeling kind-of chilly. I presume being cold is due to having every window in the house open to let the booze-smell out and the aching muscles due to a hard-fought race the day before. I head off to the race today and decide to line up and give it a shot even though I’m not feeling 100%. I feel strong off the start and ride very well for the first lap, I’m sticking with the lead group, but about 10 minutes in I feel like I’m breathing pretty hard considering my actual effort level. My pace doesn’t fall off until the third lap when I feel like I can’t breathe in deep enough to keep racing. I back it off to a JRA pace but I am not catching my breath. I decide I need to stop or I’m going to be in serious trouble, riding off the trail into the woods is the image playing itself out in my head. I know I’m going to get lapped out of the race anyways, not finishing vs not getting a time seems irrelevant at the moment. Once I stop completely it hardly takes any time and I can breathe again, I change and spectate the rest of the race with a down jacket on and feeling rather comfortable. I think I might be catching a cold so pick up some COLD-FX and DayQuil on the way home, I dose up on DayQuil and feel just fine for the rest of the day.

Day 2: I wake up feeling rather miserable and chug back some more DayQuil, pop some Ibuprofen, some Cold-FX, a couple Vitamin-C tablets, a multi-vitamin and some B-12 (this is not for the cold – I’ll write about this eventually). I’m pretty shivery and my face is hot, that gets a lazy student diagnosis as a fever even though I have no thermometer. I don’t feel like eating much – so I don’t. My achy lower back now includes knees, piriformis, triceps, pectorals and a mild headache. Those are all of the muscles or joints I’ve stressed during the last week of workouts… I’m not terribly surprised that the parts of my body with tissue rebuilding are going to be hot-spots for influenza aches. I feel a lot better within about half an hour of my vitamin binge but still deem myself diagnosed when that irritated throat from yesterday morning starts to become a cough. Diagnostic criteria are as follows:

• Aute onset of new cough or change in existing cough, plus one or more of the following:
• fever (> 38C on arrival or by history)
• sore throat
• joint pain
• muscle aches
• severe exhaustion

By 4 pm I’m ready for bed, that finishes my tally for racking up all of the criteria for having H1N1 (while not necessarily severe exhaustion it is certainly exhaustion) and being satisfied with a fantastic diagnosis I go to sleep. Total caloric intake for the day is below a thousand calories. I don’t think I’ve done that in a decade! I wake up at 10pm and stay awake for an hour before getting some NyQuil in me and heading back off to sleep.

Day 3:I strategically wake up at 7am to down my morning dose of DayQuil, Ibuprofen, Cold-FX and Vitamin-C before heading back to sleep for an hour. I wake up after the effects of the drugs are in full swing and I feel pretty good. My voice has deteriorated to the point that I occasionally sound like a braking train (Example soundtrack). The aches are a tad less but my nose has started to run a bit more and I can tell I’m totally dehydrated. I have been sweating like crazy and the hoodie I slept in is kind-of damp. I last until 6pm and then take a snooze for a couple hours. I set an alarm to wake up again to re-dose on NyQuil for some drug induced ZZZzzzz’s which should guarantee me to sleep through the night. Total calories is less than 600 – new record – and half of that is from a slice of chocolate cake – totally nutritious.

Day 4:I do the early wakeup to get drugs in my system before having to get out of bed, unfortunately I’m probably starting to get over this flu as I’m not so totally tired that I can immediately fall back asleep for the next hour. So be it, and I resign to laying and shivering in my somewhat damp clothes. I do what every serious triathlete does when lying around in bed in the morning, I take my pulse, and then I do what every engineer-triathlete does, do it five times to try and get a measure of the accuracy. The results are not to my pleasing: 75-80 bpm, resting with legs slightly elevated. That’s about 40 bpm higher than it should be – definitely still sick. The aches have left my legs but my back is quite sore today. Total calories for the day are around 1000 as I noticed that my pants are really loose and that I’m rapidly loosing weight, I need to get some food in regardless of my desire to do so.

Day 5:Waking up early to drug myself into an acceptable state to get out of bed has become routine. I repeat the method again, it seems to work. Today the fever is gone but I still occasionally find myself with the chills. I feel like I’ve developed more of a head-cold than a full body flu as I’m rather blocked up in my sinuses. Basically no appetite but eat regardless. I weigh in at 11 pounds less than I did last Friday today, that’s weight loss that rivals what those chumps are doing on “The Biggest Loser”. Not good news – bad enough news that I’m not even going to bother trying to race at Provincials in a week, I’m too wrecked from this to recover back to race-shape within a week and I know it. I’ve got my fingers crossed that I could go for an easy swim on the weekend.

Day 6:I wake-up and deem myself no longer sick. I’m a far cry from healthy, but I wouldn’t even call this a bad cold any-more, just a cough and runny nose, I’m like a walking talking model of health with a few ribs showing. Oh, and the fact that it was 1pm before I realized I should eat something. I’ve still not been hungry yet since this started although last night after my weigh-scale nightmare I cooked up a serious meal and ate lots of it. No sensation of hunger when I started eating or sensation of satiation when I finished. Hopefully that aspect of normality returns or I fear I’ll keep rapidly cutting weight.

My third race in the Expert category went down this morning. Fun times – challenging course with the conditions we had which were slick clay and mud that really caked on the wheels. I was riding tyres that were the shape of my fork and my seat stays for much of the race, nicely moulded that way as the mud was scraped into that shape. I felt like the course was going to be not the kind of course I would find it easy to pass on. really quick accelerations would be required, so I opted to go to the front off the start and make people pass me. I rode about 3/4 of a lap in the lead before some guys went to the front and really started pushing the pace. The whole race sped up at that point and by the time we were two laps in (of seven) I wa running about 6th place which was where I probably belonged.

In front of me were 3 guys who have all upgraded from the sport category this year already, there is no secret, the novice field had been pretty tough competition earlier this year. The truth is though that the cream has also been skimmed off the top of the Expert field over the course of the past 6 weeks with a bunch of upgrades. In any case, I felt like I was placed well and rode the next 4.5 laps in that position really fighting to stay there, even though I was quite a ways off the lead I still felt like I was battling it out which was totally fun. The mud caking was tough for me but it got worse for the women who raced next as we chewed up the course and mooshed all of the leaves that were nicely initially shielding our shoes from the mud into the mud. In any case the womens race was a mud-fest. The Elite men who raced afterwards however had far more favorable conditions as the course started to dry out, by the end of their hour the course was really improved. OK, back to my race, in the end we pulled in Tommy (Juventus) because he had to disconnect his front brake due to mud an couldn’t go as fast anymore. We nearly caught another Calgary cycle guy who we were rapidly gaining on (400m more would have done it) who had a stick and mud jammed in his cassette and was restricted to his easiest two gears. I wound up fifth. Not bad at all!

The elite men were great fun to watch – footage follows:

In the end it would have been nice to see the fast guys struggle with the worst conditions of the day instead of the best. It’s amazing what a difference of just one hour can make. A few more photos follow – Derek raced sport, Lesley, Bridget and Karen raced with the Women and Jon, Andre, Dave, Mike, Mark and Peter all raced with the Elites. I was the lone Hardcorian amongst the Experts. Quite a fantastic showing by the club today!

I made my debut in the Expert Category this weekend and in my opinion I managed to have a respectable set of performances. Saturday’s course was very flat and had only very short technical sections, in the end it was basically a cyclocross time trial. I nailed it, with an average heart rate 176 BPM average for the 50min race. That’s huge, basically it means that there’s no recovery out there on the course and I really benefited from that, I really reeled some people back in during the final push to the finish. I overtook for fifth with about 400 yards to go and then was lucky with fourth trying to pass for a podium position and driving himself off into the tape and onto his bum. I just kept pushing my surge through the finish and took home fourth place only a second ahead of fifth and sixth!

Sunday’s race was a long paved climb and then a winding and sometimes flowy, sometimes technical descent on mostly grass. There was a long sand section to ride with a corner in it which proved to be a challenge and some really fun winding bits in a natural bowl in front of all the spectators. An excellent course to watch the race from. I started out knowing that I had to go really hard when I was going and do my best to recover during the flowy and fast descent. I found it incredibly difficult to push harder than my threshold effort on the climb without totally self destructing and starting to make errors on the descent. After 3 of the 9 laps I had resorted to backing off on the hard bits to only a threshold effort which I found was allowing me to make time on my competition on the descent instead of giving it away. I was following two guys quite closely and knew that I probably should be able to out-do them in the end. They got tired faster than me and eventually were caught taking it easy where they should have been working. I passed both of them and nailed the finish, moving up to ninth. Very respectable again considering the course was not designed to my strengths. I filmed the elite race, footage follows:

I’ve also been asked a lot of times why people would try and bunnyhop the barriers if there’s a way larger chance of screwing it up. Same deal with riding a challenging portion of sand, sometimes it is just as fast to get off an run and you’ll wind up less tired; why ride? The answer is simple, if you can do it successfully you are definitely the rooster amongst a bunch of chickens.

It’s the same reason that the caveman decided he was going to spend all day trying to kill a woolly mammoth for dinner instead of going out and collecting berries and digging up roots, an almost guaranteed way to stay fed. The chance that he’d return home to the cave with no food following a day of hunting was way greater, but the reward for coming home with a woolly mammoth leg over your shoulder is way greater: you’re a hero!

Lunch-hour findings: Video of the C-race at the Dark-Knight cyclocross race in Calgary a couple weeks back. I wound up second place after a hard-fought battle. I rode off the front from laps 2-4 and was then passed. I got caught up in a corner which doesn’t make it into the footage from this clip when lapping one rider who was being passed simultaneously on both the left and the right, and decided to step left, into me! Anyways, I did bring down the gap over the last lap and had caught first place but lost traction in a corner (legs running on all cylinders – brain running on none) and had to unclip, hobble a bit and get going again. The damage was done then and the leader’s gap going into the final sand pit was too long for me to run past him. I finished only a couple seconds down (I’m wearing the hardcore kit and have glow-hoops in my white helmet). In any case, roll the footage:

Thanks to Dallas Morris for the video footage. And to Bill Quinney for the following photos:

The next day I wound up 5th place and more than a minute back of the leader at ‘Oval Cross’, run on the same course in significantly more challenging conditions (super wet and snow). I really struggled to clip in with my cleats which cost me a couple seconds about 4 times per lap, there were sections I was riding very quickly but to do well over-all you need to be able to put together the whole picture at the same time and that didn’t happen on that day. 5th was still good enough for an upgrade to Expert though and I’ll be racing there on the next go-round of ‘cross racing.

You can’t spell bicycle without also spelling ‘bile’

Nationals was a hurting situation, my result was +2 laps, I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to make it to the finish but did kind of expect that I’d last until my penultimate lap before being passed by the race leader… and then a while later by the rest of the eventual podium. I entered the race not anticipating that I’d do well, but didn’t really realize that pretty much no-one else had similar plans. Plenty of the guys who race (and race well) in the Elite field in the Alberta Cup series were well off the back of the race.

Bile… well I was/am sick which in retrospect I’m only kind-of surprised by after a chilly and wet last weekend, a wet and cold ‘cross race on Tuesday night and a very cold ‘cross lesson on Wednesday night. Pre-riding the course on Friday night was evidently the last nail in the coffin and by midnight I was sick. Race-morning I managed down some dry toast and went back to bed instead of going out to the race site to watch Lesley win Hardcore/Triathlon Club what I believe is their first ever national championship (mega-congratulations!). I did eat a proper lunch before heading out to the race site and did a lousy warm-up. I didn’t have a trainer and riding around in the minus 5 degree weather to get the legs warm resulted in wind-chill to get the chin and toes really cold. Oh well, after running what I felt like was a respectable warm-up lap I staged for the start along with 38 others. Not willing to throw elbows and shoulders in the sprint down the start I took the first corner in last place… not to be relinquished. Not to be totally ridiculous I stayed on the pace for 3/4 of a lap at which point my HR was already 185 bpm and I needed to let it go. I didn’t actually puke (this time) but was starting to debate where I should hurl for maximum crowd-appeal, so maybe it’s a good thing they pulled me off the course.

All in all I’ll probably chalk it up as a good learning experience if it turns out that I didn’t get a whole lot more sick by doing so, the jury’s still out on that one. After two laps I had a rather jarring crash and was already well off the back of the pace. I had a legitimate reason to quit, besides crashing and being covered in snow and aching on my right hand side my brake hoods were way out of square and I had to bash them back into line to release the brakes. Quitting can’t be an option I had to tell myself as I hopped aboard and mentally ran through a list of body parts checking that they all still worked. If quitting is allowed to be an option things can turn south quickly, on August 29 there will inevitably be a reason to quit. The list of reasons to back off the pace is guaranteed to be long, not accepting the offer to quit is the name of the game.