My partner got covid first. It was quite snotty and sneezy, then she got the fever.
I lost my sense of taste and smell, and that was hard for me. They’re usually very strong: without covid, I have a love of exploring the perfume counter at every airport that drives my other half round the bend, a slightly off-piste tea tasting hobby and a trigger-happy gag reflex.
Then I got the fever, and then the breathlessness and dizziness. Just getting out of bed and going to the kitchen made me feel woozy and wheezy. Thinking I was on the mend one day, I called a friend. She said she could hear my breathlessness – I kept taking breaths mid-sentence. Sometimes it felt like my heart was working really hard, as if I’d just run for an unusually fast bus, even though I was lying in bed watching telly. I got dehydrated and had to drink lots of water.
Training was out of the question. As the illness eased up, my temperature started going up and down, then the general trend was down. The breathlessness and dizziness lasted a while, but mainly I felt flattened by exhaustion; I kept needing to go back to bed for a nap.
It was really helpful to get messages from other people who’d had it, urging me to take things slowly and reminding me that recovery took a while. Hearing that, after the first couple of weeks of feeling dreadful, they’d needed a couple of months to recover properly made me set realistic expectations and reassured me that it would pass. I’d also seen MD in Private Eye – a great source of sensible information and opinion during the pandemic – recommend taking plenty of rest and time to get back to normal.
When I was a teenager, I had glandular fever followed by chronic fatigue. At the time, the advice was to manage it by doing an hour of your normal activity (school work, not hard training!) then taking an hour’s rest – a way of pacing yourself. I remembered that and started doing it. I find it really hard to sleep during the day, but just lying down and resting was enough. I noticed that the exhaustion made my body feel quite tense, and relaxing more intentionally really helped. In his totally amazing book The Essence of Shaolin White Crane, Dr Yang, Jwing-Ming describes a meditation practice you can do lying down – it’s fine to fall asleep, he says, and can be beneficial. A meditation practice also helps you deal with the kind of thoughts that prevent proper rest, like ‘Did I lock the back door?’, ‘Can I justify another Thai delivery – of course I can I’m ill – what shall I have…’ and ‘Will I be able to get my gi on after all these deliveries?’.
My first post-covid activity was yin yoga, which involves gentle stretches held for a couple of minutes to help the body relax and recover. I also did restorative yoga and yoga nidra, both of which are also aimed at relaxation and physical recovery. These practices are gentle, but still work with the body, so a few, well-spaced sessions were plenty to begin with. I also went back to qigong classes, which I started on Zoom last year and absolutely love.
Feeling much better one day, I did an hour of my usual, more intense yoga session, but was shattered the next day, and could hardly do anything. I took the lesson to heart, rested, and wrote a plan for getting back to my normal training regime. Most days I do a bit of my usual karate or yoga class, then stop, and I’m gradually adding more time each week. It seems to be working so far. Other people have recovered by doing the whole karate session, but gently, and ‘walking through it’.
The most important aspect of recovery from illness or injury is keeping in touch with your body. That sounds easy – we live in the thing don’t we? – but we often veto what the body needs with our own ideas about what we should be doing, whether that’s forcing ourselves to keep going when we shouldn’t or sitting in front of the telly instead of training. There’s also the fear of damaging yourself more. Am I breathless because I have covid, or because I’m worried about covid? Do I need to rest because I’m tired because of covid, or am I just tired because I’m… tired?
Illness and injury are part of training: they force you to learn more about finding a balance between rest and activity. Managing frustration at not being able to do much is also part of this – you have to develop patience, which is essential to developing anything else.
There’s an NHS website dedicated to helping people recover after covid. Do talk to your GP if you’re worried.
Gambatte!
Some other thoughts 