What Getting COVID Taught Me About Fitness Over 40
It was an awful experience, but I learned an important lesson
Getting COVID for the first time recently was horrible, but it did teach me a fitness lesson I wasn’t expecting as I make my way through my early 40s.
Don’t get me wrong, having COVID was the worst.
The body pain, the crushing fatigue, the nausea, the 104 fever, the loss of smell … the list goes on (if you’re interested in my hour-by-hour account of having and recovering from our pandemic pal, you can read that here).
After one week of active symptoms and another week and a half of low energy, however, I noticed that an unrelated, longstanding physical issue had healed as well.
The beginning
About a year ago, I was in the emergency room.
After talking to several doctors about some symptoms I’d been having, I wound up at the hospital after my entire body went numb and I nearly passed out at one of my son’s hockey game.
Starting in the prior spring, doctors had been asking me the same scary question: “do you have a family history of MS?”
I was having numbness throughout my body and random dizziness, especially after exercise.
A head CT and two different spinal MRIs ruled out a brain tumor and Multiple Sclerosis, but they did turn up two bulging discs in my back.
When I would go running, do challenging yoga, or push too hard at the gym, the discs were evidently being compressed and causing problems (the first time this happened after a run, a wave of grey fell over me and I almost passed out).
I wound up slipping a disc twice after that, which was one of the most painful experiences of my life.
After enough time and traction exercises had passed, however, the numbness in my body had faded to almost nothing.
But this nagging pain in my lower back just wouldn’t go away.
Enter the Coronavirus
As I mentioned, my first week with COVID was hell. Fatigue and nausea kept me in bed for, no exaggeration, probably 21 out of every 24 hours. I was that sick.
Yet it turns out that’s exactly what my back needed. A couple days after I returned to upright life, I realized that, for the first time I could remember, that my back pain was gone.
What my back needed more than traction or stretching or strengthening exercises was time to do … nothing. Time to rest and heal.
When we’re young, we tend to push ourselves so hard at the gym and during other fitness activities as we chase gains, speed, endurance, whatever.
But 40 is a wakeup call. After I crossed that threshold, I found myself getting injured a lot more easily and then trying to return to normal activities too quickly and running into disappointing setbacks.
The sad fact is, when you get older, all of your fitness activities need to take injury prevention and recovery into account.
That’s the lesson that I’ll take away from COVID: as you age, you need to accept your body’s limitations and the need for more rest. It’s a lesson many of us don’t want to accept, but it’s the key to staying active in the long run.
The virus forced me to learn it the hard way, but I’ve begun applying it since and it’s paying off.
Starting in late September, I had a nagging golf elbow issue that I kept trying to fight through, to no avail.
Finally, the COVID lesson kicked in.
After rejigging my workout and avoiding certain exercises that were straining the joint, I was back to full steam with a new approach within a week and a half — the same amount of time it took me to start feeling normal again after my bout of COVID.
Unfortunately, staying fit after 40 requires a much more pragmatic approach.
But it sure beats being on the shelf.
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