Autumn Comeback: Muddling Along with Running and Fibromyalgia

Picture this: a tomato-faced woman shuffling through a 5K, counting down the days until autumn. That was my entire summer running ‘strategy’. I realised that I hadn’t blogged about running for quite some time, so thought I’d do a short post with where things are at the moment.

Why summer can be problematic for runners if you have fibromyalgia and are perimenopausal

I managed to continue running over summer but I found it really hard. Even pre fibromyalgia I’ve never been a summer person. I don’t tolerate heat well, and throw fibromyalgia and perimenopause into the mix and it gets worse. One of the symptoms of fibromyalgia is not being able to regulate your body temperature properly, so feeling boiling hot or freezing cold is situation normal. Added to that is perimenopause, when vigorous exercise can trigger hot flushes.

So with all of that, my summer runs largely consisted of slow 5Ks on days when it wasn’t too hot, and me trotting along with a tomato red face. Honestly, if this had been my first experience of running I wouldn’t have carried on, as I didn’t enjoy it at all but knew I had to stick at it if I didn’t want to be starting from scratch when autumn ticked around.

Getting back on track

Thankfully, now that the weather’s cooler, my running mojo has returned. It seems that the colder and the wetter is it, the more I enjoy it. Next month, I have my second 10K event and I’ve been following the same training plan for that as I did first time around. It’s a really simple plan from Running for Beginners bookzine and seems to suit me just fine.

Managing Symptoms

That being said, being a runner with fibromyalgia it does have its challenges. The unpredictability of the condition means that some days when I’m supposed to go out running according to the plan, it’s impossible for me to do so. This would generally be if pain levels are too high or if sleep has been even more disrupted than normal. Likewise, on migraine days, I don’t run, as I know from past experience that running makes my migraine worse.

When I first started running, I kept a log of my symptoms so that I could understand how much I could push and how much rest I needed. Symptom tracking was also how I knew that for me, running and migraine was not a happy combination. It’s a case of adapting as I go along, after all, running training plans weren’t written with people living with chronic illness in mind.

So, in short, I’m just trying to muddle along in the best way that I can. Nonetheless, I’m glad to be back running properly now that the weather is cooler.