Some things are inevitable during winter in northern Michigan.
There is the seemingly continuous snowfall. And the months-long, sometimes unbearable cabin fever.
Then there's what we in the newsroom affectionately refer to as "The Grunge," a blanket term used to describe the multitude of undesirable cold- and flu-like symptoms that practically are preordained in this climate.
As an aside, I've never experienced such a cesspool of disease as an office. Not a college dorm, not a middle school playground. In the office, you literally can watch an illness take out your coworkers one by one, sort of like the bad guy in a slasher film, while cowering at your desk and praying it somehow overlooks you in the midst of all the carnage.
Last week, despite semi-neurotic anti-bacterial gel application, I became the latest grunge casualty, complete with sinus pressure, runny nose, sore throat, low fever and chest-racking cough.
I was confronted with the inevitable question: To run or not to run?
The Internet abounds with opinions on whether to run when feeling sick -- seriously, a Google search of "running while sick" yields more than 36 million results. I pared down the advice to the following key dictums.
One, according to Runner's World, is the so-called "neck rule," which dictates that symptoms above the neck -- stuffy nose, headache, sneezing -- likely should not interrupt training, whereas symptoms below the neck -- chest cold, aches, fatigue -- should lead a runner to hang up his or her running shoes until those symptoms subside.
The rule's premise is that running with those above-the-neck, head cold-type symptoms actually can provide beneficial physical and mental boosts that may help reduce the length of the illness, while running with the below-the-neck symptoms can exacerbate the malaise.
Frustratingly, most experts agree that while general exercise can help reduce the likelihood of getting sick in the first place, intense training of the sort required to run a marathon can impact a runner's immune system negatively, resulting in greater susceptibility to illness.
Next, a fever, particularly one more than 100 degrees, should make a runner think twice before hitting the road. Running can cause the fever to rise and can hasten dehydration.
Most important is the exercise of a little common sense. Although it can feel devastating to forgo training, even for a day or two, sometimes a run just feels wrong.
Confusingly, my symptoms were located both above and below the neck and included a 99.6-degree fever. Last Monday, before they really took off, I halted a six-mile run half-way through when fatigue and sinus pressure literally stopped me in my tracks. After that, the grunge really had me in its clutches, and I ended up skipping my mid-week three-, six- and three-mile runs.
After a couple days of crossing my fingers while overdosing on Zicam and Airborne, I gave in and on Friday made a doctors appointment.
My doctor, perhaps seeing the panic in my feverish eyes when I expressed my all-encompassing desire to get my training back on track, prescribed a five-day Z-Pak. The antibiotics made an almost immediate difference, and, although I still was experiencing some of the above-the-neck symptoms, I was back on the road with a five-mile run on Sunday and my first-ever half-marathon on Monday. Surprisingly, my performance during the runs was on par with normal -- affirmation of the neck rule.
Aside from the sporadic alarm I feel at last week's deviation from my training program, the major downside of missing 12 miles worth of training has been the unwelcome return of the intense, post-run muscle soreness that I thought I left behind somewhere around week five.
I'm just going to add that to my list of winter-time inevitabilities.
Record-Eagle copy editor and first-time marathon runner Claire Walters is chronicling her training experiences in a bi-weekly column as she prepares for the May 23 Bayshore Marathon. Readers also can follow her progress by reading her blog at http://blogs.record-eagle.com. The blog contains her training schedule and log, and she invites advice and comments from other runners.
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