The Long Road Back

September 17, 2022

Hey again, Slowtwitch. It’s been a while since my last article. Sadly my mid-season break involved a lot more laying in bed than exploring Spain. I got a stomach bug and then COVID back to back. I know this isn’t news to anyone as we are all coming down with it eventually. Many athletes I race have had COVID recently and some of us are still getting pretty sick from it.

The drama all started when I flew to Pontevedra World Cup, which was to be my last race before a mid-season rest. Very quickly after showing up my boyfriend and I both found ourselves with what we think was norovirus. I was in bed much of the weekend and didn’t start the race. We likely picked it up at dinner the night before flying. I went out to eat with a friend. It was the last night we were both in Girona, Spain before I went to race the World Cup and she went to race the Commonwealth Games. Then I came back still hungry and, like only athletes do, I went for a second meal with my boyfriend. If I could take one thing back, I wouldn’t have gone out for a second dinner and maybe avoided the stomach bug. Live and learn, it might be better to stick with one dinner.

We survived the weekend and were back in Girona for just one day when I woke up early in the morning to a raging sore throat. Spain is not the place where you want to be sick early in the morning. It was a brutal wait for the stores to open at like 9am to get medicine and throat lozenges. We did have a couple leftover COVID tests after having confirmed that neither of us had COVID over the weekend in Pontevedra. This time the second line lit up right away.

Surprisingly, it was my first time with COVID. I’ve been on so many overnight international flights and had even been one of the lucky ones to travel and race internationally in 2020 before we had vaccines. Yet COVID got me on that quick two hour flight.

I had a terribly sore throat, a fever for a couple days, and a cough that lasted a while. All in all, between the stomach bug and COVID, it was about ten days off training. Seven of those days were completely lying in bed doing nothing. Some athletes call that an off season. It wasn’t exactly the couple days of touring Spain that I had planned for my mid-season break.

I waited until I was completely off medicine and feeling restless before doing any training. The biggest advice I was given was to take the first week or more back training all easy and aerobic. The major fear is that doing intensity too soon can cause the virus to linger and slow full recovery. Even going easy, that first week was tough! I was still really congested and my energy levels were low. I did get lucky (or took it easy enough) that I never experienced the second slump of fatigue and symptoms that some other athletes have experienced. I also made sure to wear my heart rate monitor for all rides and runs early on. Thankfully I didn’t have any heart rate or other major health concerns. Probably luck again, and likely the vaccines have all helped.

I am back training now, and coming back has probably been as smooth as I could’ve hoped for. I am well aware many many people have had COVID far worse than I just did, so I can’t complain too much. But as an elite athlete, to have a forced week plus break in the middle of the season and then come back to training still with reduced energy levels for the next couple weeks is really hard. I’ve canceled multiple race plans and my fitness is still not where it was pre-illness. I guess that’s life these days.

My main focus currently is accumulating base fitness across the three sports. Aerobic base is always my first priority over intensity, so this isn’t anything new. However, my recent training has looked more like what I would expect to do over winter than in the middle of race season. I keep telling people that it’s okay and building back fitness is the fun part. I think that is mostly true. I love building fitness, going through the daily grind motions, getting exhausted, then getting stronger.

Fingers crossed, my first race back will be Karlovy Vary World Cup in Czech Republic. Karlovy Vary is a tiny spa town full of natural mineral hot springs. The buildings are all old colorful architecture nestled into the hillsides. Athletes either avoid this race at all costs or come to it every year. I absolutely love it. It’s probably the closest thing we get to an adventure race in World Triathlon. The swim is in a lake and you loop around an island where there’s not really enough space for everyone in the water. The bike is hilly, cobbled, twisty, and has one incredibly steep hill each lap where we are all out of the saddle in our small chain rings with quads on fire. The run is again hilly and hard. It may be a tough first race back. However, it was the last of a couple World Cups I had hoped to race in Europe and I think every extra training week I can get before racing will help. This event will be just six weeks after I first started back swimming, biking, and running. I feel totally confident that I am healthy to race but still pretty unsure what the result will be.

For now, I am just going through the motions and trying to have fun. If anything, I got a couple more weeks of training in Girona out of all this. I might write more about my time training here in the next article, but wow it has been a fantastic spot. I’m also still on a high from my last race at Hamburg WTCS. Early in the bike I was in a small group that was holding about 7 seconds back from the leaders. I was sitting on Maya Kingma and Laura Lindemann’s wheels. I thought those two would pull us up to the front quickly, so I was trying to be smart and not do too much extra work. Some time went by and our gap wasn’t closing. I decided to make a move and put in a huge surge to catch the leaders. It worked. It also just about killed me. I then sat on the back of what had become the lead group, hanging on by sheer force of will, for the next little while as my legs recovered. Making short fast moves is something I talk about and practice a lot in training, but that was the first time I’ve actually executed it during a large race and the result was moving up to the front of a WTCS. Sometimes it’s all about the little signs of progress within a race.