Is Running Making You Sick? Try Vitamin C

Sunday’s workout featured 18 miles of joggling on snow covered, icy paths. It even had 3 incidences of slipping and falling without making a brilliant saving catch. The pain experienced and the annoyance of running so slow is starting to wear on me. Is there anything positive about being a marathon joggler in this brutal Chicago winter weather?

Well, it turns out there is. Running combined with daily doses of vitamin C was shown to reduce the chances of catching a cold by 50%.

The results were reported in a reviewed published by a joint team from the Australian National University and the University of Helsinki, Finland. They looked at data from studies in the last few decades that included 11,000 participants. They found for most people, vitamin C had no positive effect at reducing incidences of getting a cold. However, for marathon runners (and jogglers too) they were 50% less likely to get sick if they took daily doses of 200 mg of Vitamin C.

Of course, to get that much Vitamin C you’ll have to drink about 32 ounces of orange juice per day. Yum. But that isn’t your only option. Consider some of these.

Food sources of Vitamin C

Eat up and joggle on.