In March 2020, Dr. Niall Elliott was planning the Summer Olympics with a colleague of the British Olympic Association. In the final stages of the competition, plans were made for what to do if an athlete suffers a catastrophic injury or mental health crisis. There was a conference on how to move the world’s best athletes around the world and how to deal with logistic snuffs.
He said they had almost all plans except for the pandemic.
Dr. Elliott was locked out of the training facility all night and began providing support and care to athletes who were afraid of how this new virus would affect their careers. The questions were endless and there were few answers.
“I was very cautious at first because it was a new virus,” said Dr. Elliott. “We didn’t know how it would affect our bodies.”
Urgent Question to Athletes: How long can Covid-19 knock you out and when can you return to training?
Since then, Olympic athletes and weekend warriors have asked that question. And as doctors learn more about the coronavirus and its variants disrupt training schedules, the answers continue to change.
The important thing is to reset your expectations and rethink your timeline to get back to play altogether or back to running.
“Compared to most viral illnesses, the expectation that athletes should have is that it takes an average of twice as long to get back to where they were,” said Dr. Tod Olin, director of the National Jewish Health’s Exercise and Performance Breathing Center. rice field. “Therefore, if you usually return to activity within a week of having seasonal flu, it can take up to two weeks after you get Covid-19 to come back. But for many, it’s three to four. It takes a week and some people take quite a long time. “
This is a difficult medicine to swallow for athletes who want to return to their original self as soon as their symptoms subside. And when many of their goals are to speed up, it’s not easy to tell runners to slow down.
of June 2020, Dr. Elliott has evolved and published a protocol adopted by other physicians as more data became available about the virus and how it affects athletes. The first protocol showed a return to six-step play, starting with a minimum of 10 days of breaks and increasing the frequency, duration, and intensity of training sessions.
Over the two years since then, doctors have made a distinction between how to teach athletes based on supra-neck and sub-neck symptoms. Patients with above-the-neck symptoms tend to recover faster and return to athletics sooner than patients with under-neck symptoms who may suffer from malaise, pain, pain, lung and heart problems. ..
That distinction helped Dr. Elliott adjust him, along with patients who were positive on the test but remained asymptomatic. Guidance for a 5-step protocol, To provide better service to athletes who want to return to training. Patients can now skip to different stages of the protocol, depending on their symptoms and severity.
And in the year of post-vaccination data, doctors discovered that boosting the pace and intensity of training sessions could dramatically backfire.
“They are used to working harder to solve all problems,” said Dr. Olin, who has worked extensively with Olympic athletes. “And the Covid-19 looks unique at first glance if you push it too hard. Training this will cause a setback phenomenon that resembles a hamstring injury. After a little better, if you try to drop it, you’ll train. I came back three months ago with a hammer for. “
I should know, it happened to me. I tested positive for Covid-19 in early May, and shortly thereafter, without actual training, my pace slowed down, but I started returning to my running routine. Surprisingly, I tested positive for Covid-19 again after four and a half weeks. (Yes, really, it’s very possible.) If I wanted to go back to running first, I was bouncing back to the wall second. This week I thought I had recovered enough to do a short speed workout. But when I hit that first interval, it seems my body laughed at me: “No”.
I learned that going to the starting line or stadium of a race should not be a race.
But athletes, and arguably runners in particular, have a special brand impatience when it comes to re-lacing shoes. When I asked readers of the running newsletter to share the story of returning to running after Covid-19, hundreds of people shared ongoing frustration and small wins. Many shared their gratitude for returning to the race and countless people expressed disappointment that their recovery was still ongoing.
Aquene Kimmel, a 26-year-old runner, said her first run after a positive Covid-19 last December was “slow jogging that felt tougher over the years.” The hills are still harder than she remembers, and her pace hasn’t completely returned to where it was, she said.
Dave Madigan, 52, said he felt the effort was harder than it should be, despite being infected with Covid in March and returning to running slowly. “My VO2max isn’t much different from what I expect, but I’m really exhausted,” Madigan said of oxygen uptake, a way to measure aerobic fitness. “I tried some short intervals, but they were much more difficult than usual.”
Jenna Ciongoli, 38, took several months before the wind became so strong. “I’m still back in running seven months later, as I used to, but I still don’t feel as fast as I used to,” she writes.
As a constantly active Denver city pulmonologist, National Jewish Health’s Dr. Vamsi Guntur is accustomed to these reactions and is beginning to talk to athletes about readjustment of expectations.
“Compared to what athletes think of recovery, what they think of recovery is different,” said Dr. Guntur.
“Very early before vaccination, one Olympic athlete said: I want to push myself,” she recalled. “I said,’I know what you can do, but I don’t want you to do that.'”
This is a more widely shared sentiment by doctors and professionals after vaccination, warning of regression if the athlete returns to high-intensity training or racing before the body is ready.
“You will always have different competitions, different races, different training sessions,” Dr. Elliott echoed.
“But you have only one body,” he added. “You have to take care of it.”
