A Case of Covid Redux

Why it's still scarier than the common cold

Welcome back. If you’re a new visitor, you should know that stories here normally involve the outdoors. This week’s post is unusual—it’s about life in limbo indoors. Before I dive in, I hope you enjoy this glimpse of the changing of the season. I took these photos two days apart.

Cobalt and Maverick before Sunday’s storm.

And after! Note the loss of leaves on the aspens. Golden leaves now carpet and dapple the snowy and muddy ground.

Also, I want to share up front the best podcast I’ve heard recently. I just discovered the Emerging Form podcast and newsletter, and this interview with author and performance expert Steve Magness, on doing hard things, was just the pep talk I needed to get back to writing and to quiet discouraging voices in my head. (You can also find it here on apple podcasts.) I loved this conversation in part because it relates both to running and creativity. The co-hosts are Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, whose daily poem lands in my email inbox every single day to spark my imagination, and Christie Aschwanden, a super accomplished journalist and science writer who wrote the book Good to Go about the strange science of athletic recovery. The hosts ask Magness up front, “What’s the hardest thing you’ve ever done?” Great question. I might answer it in a future post. Feel free to share your answer in the comments below.

I did not run for seven days straight, Tuesday through Monday. Every day last week, I woke up feeling as if my head were stuffed with cotton that muddled thoughts, dried out eyes and mouth, and packed my sinuses with gunk.

Covid hit again. First my husband came down with symptoms and tested positive earlier in the week, and I followed on Thursday (although if I’m honest with myself, in hindsight, I had symptoms a couple of days prior, which I ignored to be strong and to take care of Morgan).

Being sick is humbling. Being sick with covid is more than that—it’s still frightening due to the uncertainty of symptoms (how bad is this gonna get? will it be the long-form version and mess with my head for months?). Isolating at home while giving up appointments, social dates, and runs fosters a disorienting funk.

We didn’t bother wearing masks when we flew to New York on October 13. I had been boosted with the new Bivalent vaccine. (Morgan had not—he had to reschedule his shot for later this month—but he has had all prior vaccines.) We both, on several occasions, had experienced covid symptoms without testing positive and then felt better the next day, which we interpreted as our bodies successfully fighting off an exposure. Our immunity, I believed, would run as strong as Kilian and Courtney.

Except, it didn’t. The virus hit hard and stirred up stressful flashbacks to March 2020, when our household got covid at the very start of the pandemic. Morgan at that time developed viral pneumonia and needed hospitalization, followed by a month on supplemental oxygen. That episode 2.5 years ago triggered deep fears of him dying (an experience I wrote about here).

A week ago Tuesday afternoon, Morgan tested positive (and at that time, I tested negative). We had started masking at the earliest sign of his symptoms, but I still feel guilty we may have exposed others during the tail end of our New York trip.

Morgan declined rapidly after testing positive and became zombie-like with drowsiness, achiness in his trunk, a low fever, and an inability to think clearly. He also was coughing a lot. He showed signs of hypoxia and sure enough, a pulse-oximeter measured his oxygen in the low 80s. Thankfully, someone locally rents oxygen machines for people suffering from altitude sickness, so we rented one, and the oxygen helped. But his breathing sounded labored overnight. I slept hardly at all because I was monitoring his condition and breath rate.

Morgan a week ago with a cannula delivering oxygen to his nose, a pulse-oximeter on his finger, and a worried Dakota on his lap.

Wednesday, he saw the doctor and got on Paxlovid, the powerful antiviral, to prevent pneumonia. It worked well—his aches, fever, and headache went away, and symptoms stabilized to those of a common cold. But he suffered the medicine’s side effects of a metallic taste in his mouth and GI troubles.

Meanwhile, I was determined and convinced I wouldn’t get sick, even though I couldn’t stop sneezing. Wednesday night, I went to bed and had vivid surrealistic dreams with memorable dialogue. (My favorite involved carbs. Sitting somewhere in the woods, I told my daughter, who was there too, “I want you to layer in GU with the rice,” and on our laps we made sushi rolls with white rice and GU gels.) I woke up with my head and trunk aching, my body overheating, and a sore throat and low fever. When I took a covid test, the pink positive line immediately appeared strong.

Morgan and I had started isolating as soon as he tested positive, and as the days wore on, I felt as if we had time-traveled to spring of 2020. We napped a lot. My legs felt tired and achy just going up our home’s flight of stairs. I cleaned the house thoroughly in stages, which wiped me out and triggered more naps. I took care of the horses in slow motion and did the gentlest forms of yoga. I felt as if I had aged 20 years.

Thankfully, Morgan improved daily and on Monday tested negative. Me, my progress has been more gradual. I feel close to normal except for a runny nose and that stuffed-head feeling in the morning. And I’ve still got that dreaded pink line showing up on the test strip.

I haven’t taken seven days off from running since the week following High Lonesome 100, and that week I hiked a lot and did strength training. This illness-induced total break from running reminds me how much I count on runs to anchor my mental as well as physical health by providing structure, purpose, and satisfaction to the day. I do my best thinking while running and feel more productive afterward. As my first coach liked to say, “Any day you can run is a good day.”

I feel as if my fitness has evaporated, because I had reduced my training significantly following October 1’s 50K, before covid struck. This informative article by Jason Koop on detraining provided some reassurance—my long experience as an ultrarunner will help slow detraining, and I shouldn’t worry about taking just one week off—but it’ll take several weeks of solid training to regain my prior fitness level.

By Tuesday midday, I couldn’t stand being sedentary. I drove to the trailhead of a relatively flat trail that starts with a gentle downward slope. I loosened up with a bit of walking and then broke into a run. Surprisingly, I felt pretty darn good. I ran 1.5 miles out, then turned around. I would limit myself to three miles—this was just a test run, after all.

I breathed fine. I ran briskly. My head felt clear. My nose finally stopped running. At the end, I felt so good, I did a couple of sets of step-ups and step-downs on a bench. I drove home thinking, I’m all better!

 Alas, another test revealed another positive pink line. Not knowing how long it’ll take to get back to testing negative—and how long I must keep rescheduling appointments or canceling sub teaching assignments, thereby leaving a teacher in a lurch—puts me in a dark mood. I don’t like this loss of control.

Testing positive again yesterday. I’ve got a red cold sore under my nose from wiping my nose so much.

I’m sharing this story partly because I don’t have much else to write about this week, but mostly to remind you that covid is still a real and present threat, even with vaccines and medicines that thankfully lower the risk of a serious or fatal case. If you have a race or a trip you care about, be vigilant about masking, sanitizing, distancing, and doing all those things we used to do to prevent catching it.

This article had smart advice about what to do and not do in advance of holiday gatherings (or any gatherings and travel).

We’re supposed to leave in three weeks for a big, special, costly trip I’ve spent a long time planning, our first trip abroad in seven years. We’re going to Peru to hike and camp along the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu and then canoe down a river through a wildlife preserve in a part of the Amazon jungle. It’s a physically demanding trip at high altitude, and we need to be 100 percent healthy. I have a bunch of stuff to do and errands to run to get ready. And f***ing covid is keeping me home in limbo. I remain optimistic, however, we’ll be on a plane to Lima in mid-November, and we most certainly both will wear N95 masks in the airport and in flight.

Related posts:

• First Snow Run - on winterizing

• Mid-Race Music and Midlife Itchy Feet - on travel