I have been off work since about the start of November 2023 with long COVID/post-viral fatigue. There are two elements to this for me: physical fatigue, and mental/social fatigue. The enforced rest period has allowed me to make improvements in the physical element and begin to slowly, slowly improve my fitness again and start to feel like I’m regaining my personal identity.
I started with very short and slow walks (10 mins) on flat areas only around my house, and when feeling better began looking at doing a couch to 5k program. I’ve had no luck with these previously as I usually stuck it out until about week two if lucky and then got distracted by something else.
One of the things I’ve found helps with the long COVID and my mental well-being while off work (it’s not actually fun being in the house unable to do much for weeks or months on end, great though it sounds when you’re healthy!) is having a routine of small things. I get up at 6am to see my husband Peter off to work, and go back to bed with the cat until about 8am. For the first few months I needed to sleep for this period, but later I’ve found reading to be enough: it makes me feel like I’ve had a rest and risen when I want to rather than need to for other obligations and sets me up well for the day.
I determine in the morning what I want or need to achieve that day, limiting this to ideally 1-2 things with anything else being an optional bonus, and usually do them in the morning as this is when I feel most active. Naps frequently featured in my afternoons for quite a while until my fatigue improved enough to no longer need them.
I don’t like taking lots of equipment out with me when I’m exercising, so the prospect of a couch to 5k program I could have on my watch and not being required to take my phone with me was appealing. It turns out Garmin have at least three options for beginner to 5k programs on their Connect site, and one of them was by Jeff Galloway and features quite a lot of walking: perfect for someone who’s just about starting to walk at a normal human speed!
I started the program on the 27th of November with three sessions a week – drills on Tuesday and Thursday, and a Run-Walk-Run session on a Saturday. My sister has been coming with me on Tuesdays and Saturdays, which has definitely helped me stick to it. I’ve had two breaks now, which have caused digital Jeff’s confidence in me achieving the 5k goal by the end of April to drop slightly, but he’s still sticking with green!
My first break was due to the flu – Pete and I spent three weeks wiped out and living off ready meals and hardly leaving the house, and a further two weeks to start feeling like a human being again. In the fifth week I only did the drill sessions, which involve almost entirely walking with a few short cadence sessions, and skipped the weekends as too intense for now: Jeff carried on the plan after my absence, but I could have done with the weekend distances being a bit shorter as they just carried on adding a half mile on each week, which is not easy to do when you’ve had a month off ill!
My second break was last week, and was directly long COVID related: I over-did things and have been wiped out. We were visiting my parents for Mother’s Day on the Friday and Saturday, and I knew I was doing a dog walk with my brother on the Sunday, so I took my running gear with me intending to do my weekend 5k training session while at my parents so I wouldn’t miss it. One thing I’ve learned with the long COVID stuff is to reserve my energy for the things that are important first of all, and the two elements on a day-to-day basis I do my best not to compromise on are my running and my uni course.
My mum decided she would come with me and do a walk, and when I got to the Run-Walk-Run section of my workout I would just go on ahead and do returns as needed (lets be clear here: I am NOT fast). She took me to Wauchope, an area managed by the Forestry Commission. She’d done a walk here before, out and back again, with one of my sisters, my sister’s partner and their two dogs. There are timber wagon tracks here, but no footpaths as such and certainly no marked routes. Where we left the car had compacted gravel tracks to both left and right – this is an important feature to note.
We headed off along the right hand track, and looped around a small peak until we were approximately opposite the car, this was about a mile in and I had not long started my Run-Walk-Run section so was a little ahead. There was a junction where the track continued ahead of me, and a turn off to the right – taking us directly away from the car. Mum indicates to go straight on so I pootle on again up a slight incline before returning to her.
“I’m not sure that’s the way.”
“What’s the path like?”
“Disappears rapidly and then becomes heather and boggy.”
“Let’s give it a try, it looks like it should be a circular back to the car.”
The seed of this comment had been planted some weeks before by my sister’s partner and the existence of two routes at the car. Obviously, for the convenience of the non-existent walkers in the area, they should be connected as a relatively short loop.
And that’s how we ended up spending the next hour holding hands while crossing bogs, heather and young trees often up to the ankle in cold water and spongy ground, with both of us gracefully descending hip deep into different (fortunately dry in this case) holes.
We did make it back to the car after a bum-slide down a final incline to the road without major injury in either case and having at least maintained a good sense of direction to where we wanted to be. I do enjoy ending up in slightly ridiculous situations while exercising, and this one was definitely up there. I’m still not sure why we kept going and didn’t just turn around back to the track.
I’m not sure when the satellite photo is from, but I can attest it doesn’t look like that any more!
I felt ok after this adventure, tired but no different to how I’ve felt over the years when I’ve done something that required exertion. Certainly well enough to do the dog walk the following day with my brother as long as we took it easy – which we did. However, he has a collie so this added up to another 1.5 physical activity session even if it was apparently easier than going for a walk with my mother.
The fatigue crash hit over the following two days. I had a quiet Monday, but knew I had a mentally challenging Tuesday ahead of me with multiple obligations – purely bad luck they were all on one day, two in the morning and two in the evening, all meeting related but fortunately only one requiring me to leave the house.
My second ‘meeting’ was with a physiotherapist at the long COVID clinic at Shotley Bridge hospital – my first in-person session with them as my original one was converted to a phone appointment when I had the flu and didn’t want to share it with everyone (or, you know, go outside). It was purely sitting and chatting and I was there about an hour. At the start of the session I was asked what my internal battery level was like and replied about 60%. By the end it had plummeted to about 20%. I stayed up long enough to get something for lunch and then went to bed with the cat, where I was sound asleep until Pete got home from work and I heard the door open.
Tuesday’s C25k session was definitely a no-go, and I wasn’t recovered enough for Thursday’s either. Fortunately I have been ahead on my uni coursework and therefore able to take a week off from the mental exertion that requires and was starting to feel vaguely human again by Friday, when we were due to take our new tiny caravan Dinky to Ullswater to meet Pete’s parents and youngest brother for a weekend in the Lake District.
Pete had been coming down with a horrendous headcold for Wed/Thurs after a training course, and I think would have cancelled the trip had it been just us but fortunately he was feeling improved by Friday. We arrived early and had a chilled afternoon and evening which also helped.
I didn’t take any running stuff with me for this, knowing we’d be back by lunchtime on Sunday and I could do a session Sunday afternoon if I felt up to it. We spent Saturday doing an approx. 1 mile walk to a waterfall off Ullswater (Aida Force) and then a long-ish drive to Muncaster Castle and a few hours there. I really needed the 15 minutes sitting by myself in our caravan when we got back before making plans for dinner: this had been about 6 hours in company and I was starting to feel somewhat wiped out, albeit all had been low pressure and I’d enjoyed the day. We hit up Penrith for a takeaway and then crashed out.
Pete’s headcold, which I thought I’d dodged, walloped me around the head Saturday night and I spent the night hugging a box of tissues and attempting to sleep on rather more pillows than usual so my nose was higher than my chest and therefore (at least in theory) less likely to leak.
We’re now back around to Monday again. I hope I’m coming out of both the cold and the fatigue fug. I’m going to make a call tomorrow morning whether I do the next drills session with my sister in the evening, and I need to pick up my uni coursework again as the deadline for submission is Thursday. Fortunately I only have one lecture to catch up on before the deadline and one question unanswered on the coursework – though I have marked up a few to go back to.
I usually try to make sure I only do enough on each day that I don’t compromise my ability to do something again tomorrow – but with my bogwalk/dogwalk weekend I’ve definitely exceeded my current capacities, even with my improved fitness. Hopefully at least this relapse is short: a previous mental overdoing last year took me 5 months to feel as I had before I undertook chairing a week long hazard assessment meeting away from home and while working during recovery, and took me almost back to square one. I have NO desire to do this again, which keeps me mostly sensible and often very boring.
Slow and steady, slow and steady – and hope desperately that it pays off and there is a chance in the future to get all elements of my life back to pre-COVID levels. I’m definitely seeing progress in the physical direction, the mental not so much yet…so me and my headache are going to sign off and go to bed for a well-earned rest!
Blue Runnings 
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