For nearly two weeks now I’ve posted no training information, or daily data updates. I’ve not trained because of a virus. On a daily basis my resting heart rate has been 50 bpm, against a pre-virus of 44-48. The virus seems to have reached fairly deep into my upper respiratory tract, although not too severely.

I’ve not felt inclined to exercise at all. Talking to the folks at Polar today, that disinclination is actually a helpful signal.

This approach also seems vindicated by my discovery this week of Art De Vany’s blog. Art’s business is uncertainty, and so it is interesting that he devotes so much to questions of exercise. I’ll deal more in later posts with Art’s work, some of which on “Holywood economics” I was already vaguely familiar with through Nassim Taleb’s Fooled By Randomness. To cut to the chase, Art’s position on exercise is that we should emulate our hunter-gatherer ancestors. That means marathons are not a good idea, and our modern diets are actually bad for us. Given that part of my instinct to run long distance was based on an intuition that it reflected a hunter-gatherer past, this is actually quite shocking.

Anyway, more on Art in due course. I’m still not over this virus, and that is more than 5 weeks training in 9 that I’ll have lost, which really puts the London Marathon project in jeopardy. I’m due to run the Bath Half Marathon in a week and a half. I could still do this at a push, just treating it as a long run. But the advice from Polar was to rethink.

Resting heart rate 50 bpm

Weight 72 kg

Mood

No exercise, virus

So goes the Talking Heads song, invoking our hunter-gatherer past. Nuts and berries must therefore be good for running, surely. I’ve not been consuming so many nuts of late, although there are still plenty left over from the Christmas larder. Berries are a different matter. At the best of times, they are expensive, and so not a regular part of the diet except in high summer. They are rich in anti-oxidants, and so good for fixing life’s daily damage. They’re supposed to be very good for muscle repair.

However, the past couple of weeks, we’ve started buying Innocent smoothies. They’re expensive compared with juice drinks. But it looks now like a false economy. The volume of fruit they contain seems enormous, particularly berries. And boy are they tasty. They do a kids’ version which has each portion that makes up that five-a-day equation marked out on the side. Feels like pure food, albeit from a carton.

Friday was a rest day, and today I remembered I could cross-train on the bike and save the legs some impact. Sunday is important for a long-run, the first in nearly a month because of virus, so saving the legs an extra day should be better in the longer term.

Resting heart rate 49 bpm

Weight 71 kg

Mood

Total excercise energy burned 588 kcal (45 mins bike)

I’ve tended to make light of colds in recent years, mocking myself with the comedic idea of “man-flu”. I have an elaborate evolutionary biology-inspired theory of man-flu that I’ll relate at some point in another post. But, after four days of ever-intensifying head cold, I started to wonder whether I did have flu. Some symptoms of muscle ache indicated flu perhaps, but most of the symptoms were confined to above the shoulders.

The last time I felt viral, I resolved that the next time, rather than not exercise at all, I might try a light session (say, 20 minutes on the bike) to see if it would have a positive effect. It is said that such a small amount of exercise is not detrimental, and could have positive benefits. This time there was no way. A week on, even though the symptoms have for the first day today been on balance lighter than the day before, I feel no better than a week ago.

Following the “feed a cold, starve a fever adage”, for which there seems to be some scientific basis, I’ve eaten a lot this week, and experienced some weight gain as a result.

Resting heart rate 51

Weight 73 kg

Mood

Sick with virus (seventh day)

Risk aversion and making suboptimal decisions is hard wired into our evolutionary biology. This seems to be the finding of tests on Simian monkeys and their responses to a variety of reward systems.

Essentially, just like humans, the monkeys demonstrate a preference for avoiding loss over the prospect of an extra gain. MRI scans have shown that we compute losses and gains in different parts of the brain, so the latest tests on monkeys revealing they too have a loss aversion suggests some older biological need is being answered.

The Economist reasons that in our natural habitat food supply is erratic, so that the pangs of hunger are felt more keenly than the prospect of abundance. While agriculture and the affluent society have changed all that on the “supply side”, we retain the attitudes of the hunter-gatherer.

In an information society, it becomes much more important to understand these biological drivers and the biases they build into our evaluation processes.

Experience suggests these features of human behaviour are better understood by marketers than economists. As has been observed before, they know the power of the statement “Hurry, while stocks last!”