Is "Long Covid" Legit? 🤔🤧🤒😷

[WillBrink]

I will say I think so. I’ve had covid 3 times. The first two times I only really felt bad for 2 days and start to finish it was 5-7 days. The third time I never had the 2 bad days and overall it was mild. The down side was it hung around for almost 2 months. Where it really stood out was my first gym workout after I was feeling better.

Lifting wasn’t a problem. I was definitely lifting less, but after a month out of the gym, that was expected. The real oh shit moment was when I got on the treadmill. I thought I would do a light mile to shake things out a little. I do quite a bit of trail running so a mile is no big deal for me. I couldn’t make it a quarter of a mile without hitting my max heart rate and had to stop. It was over an hour after stopping that my heart rate returned to under 100bpm. My normal resting heart rate is usually between 50-55. It stayed 20-25 bpm higher for about two weeks and I was exhausted the whole time. My HRV stayed in the medium to high stress range even when sleeping. I eventually started to feel normal and get restful sleep. It’s taken me about another month to get back to being able to do an unbroken mile on the treadmill at a little under 10 min mile pace. Was it long covid? I don’t know, but something hung a boat anchor on my heart after having it.

You should see a doc about being tested for any cardio - pulmonary issues, perhaps miocarditis related. I'd rule that out. Recent thoughts/recs on long covid: https://brinkzone.com/addressing-long-covid/