[thewizardofaus]

Covid fatigue is no joke.

As an Elite Athlete I'm training 20-30 hours a week. I got covid last year (triple vaxed) and it wiped me out for a good 6 months. It took me 3 weeks to be able to walk longer than a minute without needing to lay down for the rest of the day and sleep.

I have dealt with fatigue problems for 6 months and only just now, do I feel like I'm getting "back to normal".

The most frustrating thing is alot of people are dismissive of the symptoms and generally say, "Oh yeah, I get tired too" but fail to understand the severity of it as they haven't experienced it.

I have a fairly good understanding of my body and the associated symptoms of overtraining/fatigue in a heavy training cycle but covid fatigue was soemthing completely different.

[_kulang]

Similar experience — and interestingly it can be seen in my resting heart rate over time and VO2 inference on my watch. The acute fatigue was quite bad (and is what people seem to talk about) but the milder lingering fatigue reduced my running and lifting performance across the board and left me tired in the late afternoon rather than the evening. It’s not life altering per se, but it impacted my routines and productivity noticeably.

Thankfully after 5 months I seem to have kicked it fully, and am ripe for another infection. Needless to say I got the bivalent booster before the holidays

[zzzeek]

I had very mild COVID in September and I totally have this problem . I have a constant urge to just go to sleep and have been afternoon napping fairly often, compared to my previous habits of never napping ever. I'm hopeful that most people talk about it lifting after six months

[twawaaay]

Resting heart rate and HRV are super useful. In my case, I knew I was going to be sick before I felt symptoms just from the sleep data.

On Garmin you can indicate you are sick and it will stop your poor training from disrupting your VO2 inference.

[RandomWorker]

That sucks. My experience was to get back to training fairly soon (2 weeks after fever went away). After that training session I knew I should rest more and took an additional 2 weeks off. Then built back up my regular training starting at 10% volume and increasing at 10% increases each week. After 3 months I was back to regular volume. My suggestion is that everyone take at least two weeks off, and build up volume very conservatively. I’ve had lots of conversations with other people that love to train. It’s hard to take it easy and do less because we love training, but this protocol seems to work for many. Maybe it’s too conservative and everyone is different.

[dTal]

If you were "training" 2 weeks after the fever went away, congratulations - you didn't have long covid.

You cannot exercise your way out of Long Covid, or other postviral fatigue syndromes - it presents identically to Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Any attempt to exercise - even something as small as a short walk, or in severe cases merely taking a shower - results in a hard crash that feels completely unlike exercise fatigue, and can effectively confine you to bed for days. And every time you provoke a crash, you set back your recovery, potentially permanently. And you can't really tell by feel what your limits are, you just have to work it out analytically and be conservative. And the whole time, your brain feels like mush.

It's really no joke.

[jupp0r]

It's kind if important whether you develop long covid or not. If you don't then you don't need a long break, if you do, you could be out for months or forever.

[spamizbad]

That's a very smart approach, and one my cyclist friend used when recovering from COVID in June of 2020. Took it easy for the rest of the year and put up some good numbers in 2021 and had his best year in 2022.

[twawaaay]

I feel for you. This is such a strange virus.

My whole family got covid so I expected to be next. But I only needed to take 2 days off at work and I paused my training for just 3 days and was almost back to my normal HR/pace in less than a week since I got first symptoms. It took me 3 more weeks before I started getting negative test results.

[Izkata]

> This is such a strange virus.

This effect was previously known as post-viral fatigue. It's not unique to covid.

[switch007]

I find it so bizarre that in almost every discussion of long COVID, an athlete who can no longer make it up a flight of stairs is invariably referenced or partakes in the discussion. I'm amazed how many people know athletes.

And it's never just extra fatigue. It's can't walk for 60 seconds, or up a flight of stairs, or open a jar.

N.B. I'm not denying post-viral fatigue. I've experienced it myself multiple times

[ribs]

From my experience, this stuff isn’t limited to COVID-19, and I don’t mean that to minimize your experience with it. I just want to note that I had the flu in 2013; my temperature got up to 104F, and I was sub-par for about that same amount of time; it was about 6 months before I felt back to 100%.

[eismcc]

Similar situation. Did a 70.3 in June and then was laid out flat like I had never been before. My watch was telling me numbers that looked like I did a full Ironman every day. For months.

I found that liver support supplements made a measurable impact.

[nradov]

What are liver supper supplements? Is there any research on this?

[djtango]

Ouch that's a really serious and painful setback to your training! Sorry to hear about your struggles. Are you back to normal now? Any lingering issues eg cardio/breathing

[journey_16162]

Are you back to training? Or do you still need to be careful? Could you share some tips about pacing / not triggerring PEMs?

[carabiner]

My friend is in his 50s, pudgy and kinda athletic but not elite, and he just had mild symptoms for a week. I wonder if "athlete's heart" could be compounding effects in some way?

[SergeAx]

> walk longer than a minute without needing to lay down for the rest of the day and sleep

I'm sorry, do you mean it literally?

[Invictus0]

Not OP but yes, literally. A friend of mine has long covid, used to run marathons. For a time he was unable to go up the stairs without crashing hard.

[chiefalchemist]

Have you been tested for Epstein Barr by any chance?

[TechBro8615]

If OP is located in Australia as his username suggests, then he likely didn't have much of a choice.

[Godel_unicode]

Hard to know that without knowing what would have happened otherwise, yeah?

This was not the worst possible result.

[TillE]

Worth what? The personal "cost" of the vaccine, outside of some extremely rare outliers, is a day or two of discomfort.

[textbookrental]

Or very worth it I guess.

[jchw]

You can't draw conclusions like this from one data point, because there's no baseline to compare it to. Not sure what kind of productive discussion you are expecting here.