HR Elevation Due To Infection?

So I've always wondered if sickness, like colds, etc could affect your conditioning and your perceived effort. Well, it looks like I have one data point that supports this notion. I read somewhere that any kind of URT infection can affect your heart rate and it seems to be the case with my eye infection...look at the graph below:



Both logs are LSD runs. They are of similar distance. The red line represents a run pre-infection and the blue line represents a run during infection. As you can see, right off the bat, I have a noticeably elevated heartrate for the during-infection run while the pace is pretty much the same. I should note, the runs were done at similar times of the day with similar weather conditions. My perceived exertion was pegged early and it caused me to slow down considerably somewhere in the middle of the run. In contrast, the run pre-infection, I felt relaxed almost throughout the whole run, except for the end where I did a tempo acceleration. Anyway, I just thought it was really interesting to see how different my heartrates were and how that affected my runs. Comments?