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Starting Over
On bodies, working out again, and picking up after several weeks off.
As longtime (if you count five weeks as a long time) readers of this blog will remember, I had a breakthrough COVID case a month ago. Given how many other people also had mild, breakthrough infections, it is not interesting that this happened to me, and the course the illness took seems to be rather well-tread, even banal: I felt a tickle in my throat and got very tired one night. Then I had flu-like symptoms for days. Then I had something resembling a head cold for a few more days.
But what I was not quite prepared for was how it would linger. I went on a couple (masked) walks towards the end of my isolation period, and the 20-minute loop down to Grand Army Plaza and back was enough to leave me exhausted. I would get winded walking up and down stairs, even in the weeks after I naively supposed I’d feel better. I felt dumb and stupid asking my roommate to take out the trash for me because I had a meeting later that day and knew that four flights of stairs would make me tired. I was just physically exhausted all the time, like I’d done a hard workout and it was late and I needed to go to bed, even if it was 10 in the morning and I’d just woken up an hour ago from a good night’s sleep. “I don’t like to use the word ‘fatigued,’” I texted a friend, “Because I feel like it’s such a…
