Question: Will it hurt me to ride my bike while I have a cold? —Leslie P.
RBR’S STAN PURDUM REPLIES: The answer depends on what you mean by “hurt me.” Since the so-called “common cold,” can refer to a variety of respiratory ailments and can range from “mild” to “acute,” the standard rule of thumb — or maybe I should say “rule of neck” — is that if the symptoms are all mild and above the neck (runny nose, scratchy throat, sneezing, slight congestion, head cold), then you can ride at a less-than-usual intensity without doing yourself any lasting harm.
However, if the symptoms are not limited to above the neck (fever, body aches, chest congestion, general weakness and/or malaise), riding anyway is likely to hurt your recovery time and even deepen your symptoms. This is the time to stay home and let your body devote all its resources to getting well.
Road Bike Rider has previously responded to a question about riding when feeling under the weather, and in the reader responses below that article, physician (and cyclist) Harold Brandt offered the following, which contains a great fire-truck analogy that’s worth repeating here:
As an internist who has also ridden for years, I always explained riding while ill (or other choices that distract your body from healing) is like having only one fire truck and needing to put out fires in two opposite parts of town (dealing with the physiologic demand of immune system vs the physiologic energy demand of exercise). Neither is going to get addressed very well and when unaddressed, one fire can blaze out of control. In this case you can choose not to exercise and therefore have your full energies directed into powering up your immune system. Remember when you have a viral infection (and many respiratory infections are just that, as well as many GI problems), they are only eliminated by your immune system and no outside medications for the most part will be of any use in this scenario. Even in bacterial infections, antibiotics provide some relief but here again the immune system is doing the clean up to prevent the re-emergence of the infection that has just been addressed in part by the antibiotics you took.
If by “hurt me” you are thinking about your performance on the bike, the answer is less clear. It’s routine for professional athletes to compete while experiencing common colds, and sometimes they do so effectively. According to section 5 of this study, “the Norwegian skiers Johannes and Tarjei Bö got first and second positions in the World Cup biathlon competition while being acutely SARS-CoV-2 positive. … Jacob Ingebritsen won the world championship in 5000-m running while suffering from a common cold. In our study, retrospective analysis revealed an outbreak of enterovirus D68 in a professional ice hockey team and 4 symptomatic players with the virus had played without any adverse events.”
I’m not particularly pursuing performance goals, and nobody is paying me to compete, so when I’m not feeling good, I don’t ride, and so far, I haven’t regretted that choice.
Stan Purdum has ridden several long-distance bike trips, including an across-America ride recounted in his book Roll Around Heaven All Day, and a trek on U.S. 62, from Niagara Falls, New York, to El Paso, Texas, the subject of his book Playing in Traffic. Stan, a freelance writer and editor, lives in Ohio. See more at www.StanPurdum.com.
My experience is more with running while “under the weather”, but my approach is to give it a try if I’m not feeling too bad. What I find is that a 30-minute run can often leave me feeling a bit better. I don’t force it; if my body tells me it’s a bad idea, I’ll quit.
There is actually some scientific logic to this. Viruses are typically very sensitive to temperature, that’s why we develop a fever when ill. As we know, exercise raises one’s body temperature, so it essentially induces a “fever” that is typically not favorable to a virus. Is 30 minutes of exercise enough to make a difference? Probably not, but I’ve always figured it can’t hurt.
Thanks for the interesting approach. The logic makes sense to me.
Luckily, I rarely get “really sick” but of course I get the occasional cold, and it was much more common when my kids (and now grand kids) were very young and bringing home all kinds of stuff from pre-school and school. I have hardly ever stopped riding due to a cold, and I find that getting my blood flowing seems to help, at least by clearing my sinuses! No hard or long rides when I’ve got symptoms, but regular rides (outdoors in good weather, on the rollers in the winter) don’t pose a problem for me. Maybe it’s an experiment of one.