Some thoughts on exercise and long covid

Having just watched the Olympics, now seems like a good time to talk about exercise.

Many of us who contracted conditions like long covid used to be fairly active. While I was never a great athlete, I did jog a marathon once, and in August of 2019, I hoofed it up the Pikes Peak Ascent, which is 13.3 miles long, has an elevation gain of 7,800 ft (21.4 km and 2377 m of elevation), and must be completed in 6.5 hours or less.

In 2020, with nothing else to do, I decided to train for another marathon. In July of that year, I was supposed to do a 9 mile long run, but I felt a little off and only did 5 miles. Three days later, I was mildly sick and too tired to run. A week later, even though I was still tired, I tried to run again. After a quarter of a mile, my lungs were burning and it was hard to breathe. I was feverish the rest of the day, and though the fever subsided, I didn’t recover. By September, I was bedridden. It would be a couple of years before I ran again.

But I did run again. Not only that, but running has been an activity that helped me process my emotions and continue to recover. However, I also haven’t written much about exercise yet because, for me, it was something that had to come later in my recovery process. Before I could begin exercising of any kind (in addition to running, I also enjoyed yoga, hiking, and rock climbing), I had to be fairly proficient in three other healing techniques: emotional processing, shaking, and somatic meditations.

Exercise vs long covid vs repressed emotions

As I mention in the links on emotional processing and shaking, we hold repressed emotions in our bodies, and exercise can trigger their release. Perhaps you’ve been to a yoga class in the past where a teacher warned that sleeping pigeon could make you cry because we store emotions in our hips, or, more succinctly, that we “store our issues in our tissues.” For my body, keeping emotions repressed was the primary source of post-exertional malaise and other issues with exercise.

What I found was that my body froze (i.e. got really sick and stopped functioning) because it had become too overwhelmed from emotional crap that was so repressed, I didn’t even know it existed. I had spent decades repressing issues and my body couldn’t take any more. However, these are big emotions, and they just get bigger and grow, like a snowball rolling down a hill, the longer we keep them repressed. If your repressed emotions are too old and too big, it can feel like allowing the emotional floodgates to open could kill you.

I am not exaggerating when I say that releasing these emotions can feel like you might die, and some of my biggest emotional releases early on really did feel like they were pushing my body to its very edge. Although I only realized it in hindsight, my body flat out resisted anything that could accidentally trigger an emotional release. Instead of allowing me to do something that might trigger the emotions trapped in my muscles and joints and fascia, my body shut down in response to certain exercises. It collapsed. It sent me to bed. My body couldn’t function because, at a subconscious level, there was such an intense, overwhelming fear that too much of this repressed stuff would be released too quickly.

I had to build up to having the capacity and inner strength to process my biggest emotions before my body would allow me to do anything that might lead to an unintentional emotional release.

How I got back into exercise

After I got sick, I didn’t bother trying to work out again for a long time. However, once I discovered JournalSpeak, I started learning to process my emotions, and I became more aware that emotional releases were often quite physical. Early on, I was in our basement on a near daily basis, raging out on my punching bag, which was a highly strenuous activity. But rather than feeling worse for the activity, I felt better. At some point, I started to wonder: if I could do the equivalent of a kickboxing class, could I go for a jog?

To be honest, I don’t really remember what was involved in starting to work out again. I think I did a practice of jogging for 30 seconds and walking for 2 minutes, and repeating that for 15-20 minutes. I’ve never been able to stick to a routine, so I did that haphazardly for a while when I felt up to it. I also tried to make sure I kept a low heart rate so that I didn’t over-stress my nervous system.

What I do remember were three different sessions in which I discovered that running could help me process emotions.

During the first one, I was just out on a little walk/jog session when I was overcome by an urge to run as fast as I can. So I did. And it was fun! It felt like I just had so much energy coursing through me and it needed an outlet. I felt like a little kid running down a hill. I didn’t last long, but it felt sooooooo good. I had a a few more sessions where something similar happened. More than just feeling good, I would often feel more connected to the ground and to anything natural around me, like the trees next to the sidewalk or the mountains off in the distance.

The second emotional/exercise breakthrough was on a day when I felt intense anger. I suddenly felt like I was an attacker chasing my prey. I was full of rage and just sprinted as fast as I could as if I was going to tackle someone I was livid with. I really felt the rage, the anger, and an internal, primal scream coursing through me as I pushed ahead ready to fight anything that got in my way. I stomped hard against the ground as I raced ahead, as if trying to squash everyone who had ever enraged me. Again, afterward, I was tired, but I felt like had released more emotions. I had a lot of jogs where I used the movement to help me process rage.

The third big emotional release was fear. In this instance, I suddenly felt the urge to run away from something terrifying as hard and fast as I could. Again, I sprinted, and this time I felt like I was running for my life, internally screaming, “No! No! No!” over and over. This, too, became an emotion that came up often to be processed during a jog.

At some point, I realized was that it was the act of running itself that was triggering and releasing these emotions for me. The movement of running was similar to that of shaking, in which energy was released through my hips and legs.

Most of the time, though, my jogs were not that extreme. I practiced low-heart-rate training (I follow the Maffetone Method), and so the slow walk/jogs that I did were often closer to moving meditations in which I used the movement to help me connect with and understand what was happening in my body.

Similar to my experiences with somatic meditations, I would use the walk-jogs as an opportunity to see where things were tight or resistant in my body, and as I moved, I would meditate on those parts to see what emotions or memories might open up to me. On some occasions, that led me to have the big emotional releases I described above, but more often than not, the exercise offered an opportunity to use movement to release some smaller repressed emotions. I also usually followed these sessions with rest, JournalSpeak, and/or more formal somatic meditations where I gave my body more time to relax and communicate with me.

I think that by staying in constant communication with my body, listening to and honoring what it needed while I was exercising, and following that with more rest and internal communication, I was able to build up a cardio practice.

I’m still no Olympic athlete, and I’m not sure if I want to train for a marathon again, but I did run my fastest 5K ever back in December. I can actually run faster now than I ever did before I got sick.

Final thoughts

I don’t have a training schedule that I stick to because that’s just not something my body likes, but I try to do some sort of workout somewhat regularly and my activities include running, climbing, hiking, yoga, qigong, and weights. Most importantly, I learned how to listen to my body and follow what it needs.

I’ll also note that strength training was a different beast for me. It triggered different emotions for me, so getting back into it was similar to but different from running. I’ll write about that in some future post.