Recovery means long road back
Athletes who had virus are left to wonder if they will ever be the same
It was the end of March, and Josh Fiske, a urologist from Livingston, N.J., was in the hospital fighting an uphill battle against the coronavirus. Just a week earlier, he had easily jogged an eight-kilometre route around his neighbourhood. But his body was failing him now.
His oxygen levels dipped dangerously low and his fever rocketed to a worrying level. Shifting his body in bed exhausted him. Walking a few steps felt like “hiking in thin air.” Opening a bottle of iced tea was “a huge task.”
Fiske kept fighting, though, and eventually, with the help of his doctors, he turned a corner. Yet even as he did, even as he seemed assured of avoiding the worst outcomes of the virus, a different sort of anxiety consumed him.
“I started to think, ‘Am I going to be able to run again? Am I going to be able to walk the golf course?’ ” said Fiske, 46, who does a marathon or half-marathon every year. “These are things I love to do.”
The coronavirus has infected millions of people around the world. Athletes tend to view themselves as perhaps better equipped than the general population to avoid the worst consequences of the disease the virus causes, COVID-19.
Yet interviews with athletes who have contracted the virus — from professionals to college athletes to weekend hobbyists — revealed their surprise at the potency of its symptoms, struggles to re-establish workout regimens, lingering battles with lung issues and muscle weakness and unsettling bouts of anxiety about whether they would be able to match their physical peaks. And with sports leagues around the world scrambling to restart play, more athletes could soon be taking on a significant amount of risk.
“It definitely shook me up a bit — it was very surreal, you know?” Von Miller, a linebacker for the Denver Broncos who contracted the virus, said in an interview. “My biggest takeaway from this experience is that no matter how great of shape you are in physically, no matter what your age is, that you’re not immune from things like this.”
Miller, who has had asthma his whole life, said he was left shaken up by shortness of breath and coughing when he tried to sleep. He said he felt himself “fatiguing faster” when he first tried working out again in his home gym, but that now he was training “full-on” again.
Experts warn that the virus does not discriminate.
That was the lesson Andrew Boselli, an offensive lineman at Florida State, learned as members of his family — including his father, Tony, a 47-year-old former NFL lineman — began showing symptoms in March. “I knew I was young and healthy,” said Boselli, 22, who moved home to Jacksonville, Fla., after the university closed its doors. “I play Division 1 football, and I’ve been training my butt off all winter and spring. I thought I had no worries. I wasn’t going to get it.”
That bullish attitude faded days later, when he awoke feeling sluggish and short of breath. That night, his body temperature climbed.
“It was the sickest I’ve ever felt,” said Boselli, who continued to feel shortness of breath and fatigue for about a week and a half.
In Italy, Paulo Dybala, an Argentine player with Juventus, described his own unnerving experience dealing with respiratory symptoms.
“I would try to train and was short of breath after five or 10 minutes,” Dybala said in an interview with the Argentine Football Association, “and we realized something was not right.”
Panagis Galiatsatos, a pulmonary physician and assistant professor at Johns Hopkins, said that, like much about the disease, the long-term consequences for athletes who contract it are not fully understood. Athletes, though, represent interesting case studies for doctors, given their generally good baseline health and nuanced awareness of their own bodies.
“Patients who are athletes, I love them, because they will pick up subtle changes sometimes way before even the tests identify a disease,” Galiatsatos said.
Galiatsatos singled out three complications from COVID-19 that could be of particular concern to athletes.
First, coronavirus patients, like anyone with a serious respiratory infection, were at risk for long-term lung issues. He often saw patients “who three months ago had a bad virus and still can’t get their breathing back to normal.”
Another complication Galiatsatos considered particularly concerning to athletes, and one experts were still trying to wrap their heads around, was the high incidence of blood clots doctors were seeing in coronavirus patients.
People diagnosed with blood clots, and prescribed blood thinners, are typically discouraged from participating in contact sports.
Finally, Galiatsatos said people unfortunate enough to be placed in intensive care could deal with “ICU-acquired weakness.” Patients placed on ventilators and confined to a bed often lost between two and 10 per cent of their muscle mass per day, he said.
Ben O’Donnell, a triathlete who lives in Onoka County, Minn., lost 45 pounds during a four-week hospital stay during which he was placed on a ventilator and a short-term life-support machine.
O’Donnell, 38, a former college football player who completed an Ironman race a couple years ago and was planning on doing another this fall, said he was pulled back from the brink of death after struggling with dangerously low levels of oxygen and kidney and liver failure in the intensive care unit.
After returning home, he needed a walker just to go out to the mailbox at the end of the driveway. In his first attempt to exercise, two days after he left the hospital, he walked for seven minutes at a speed of 1.9 km/h using supplemental oxygen. He has been trying to add a minute of time, and a bit of speed, each day.
O’Donnell said he was struggling with “a fair amount of doubt” about his ability to get back in shape for the race. But he has motivated himself with the secondary goal of raising money for coronavirus relief, and he has been repeating the same mantra ever since he was struggling in his hospital bed: “Don’t stop. Don’t quit. Keep moving forward.”