COVID Recovery - Lindsay Straughton

At the end of October 2021 I went into a 2 week off season break on the back of a summer of race PBs and the fittest, strongest and fastest I’ve ever been across all triathlon disciplines. After the break, day 1 of LakesMan 140.6 training came around and was meant to be an easy zone 2, low HR run. I knew straight away that something wasn’t right; my HR was higher than it should have been and was heading skyward at the slightest hint of an incline in the road.

By the afternoon I had the sneezes and thought bugger, I’m starting with the mother of all head colds…..sure enough the following morning I was a mucus filled snot ridden mess. At this point I felt reasonably ok and a lateral flow test showed negative, but as I was due to travel for work the following day I went for a PCR just to be safe.

Yep. Covid Positive. Turns out I’d caught it at my Tri club end of season do 72hrs earlier (picking up the Most Improved Triathlete award!!)…… and it would go on to take out around 30% of the attendees over the following days!

Now I’ll start by saying that I wasn’t really all that poorly! I had none of the classic Covid symptoms and the first few days I just had a head cold and felt a bit more tired than normal. Days 3-6 were the worst where I felt like I had vertigo – constant room spin and nausea! By day 7 I was feeling better and even ventured a couple of easy sessions on the turbo trainer.

This did, however, mean that my LakesMan training plan would probably have to take a back burner until we figured out how much Covid had knocked my fitness. It turned out to be quite a lot!

48hrs after freedom day I felt absolutely fine and if anyone had asked, I’d have said I was 100% recovered….. but my attempt at an easy zone 2 run proved otherwise! I ended up running my usual 5 mile loop almost 2 minutes/mile slower than my normal pace; I had to walk up some of the hills and was still hitting max HR. Strava tells me I did a zone 1 pace run in zone 5 HR!

Coach Paul was going to have to rethink my plan.

At this point he sent me a podcast about athlete recovery from Covid, it came through with the message “you won’t like it” and he was right. Essentially the advice was that it takes around 10 weeks to fully recover. WTF?? That’s the entire base phase of my training plan!!!

Queue lots of chats about what we were going to do.

In the end, we decided to take the opportunity to build my strength with more gym sessions, focus on my swim technique (plus anything over 1,500m and the vertigo was kicking back in!) and address a niggling issue I was having with my foot. I was under strict instructions that I was to do NOTHING that pushed my HR too high and if it went into zone 5 I had to stop immediately.

At this point I should also say thanks to Mark Taylor at Bespoked Physio, who took the time to analyse my running and listen to my issues and come up with not only the most likely cause but also potential solutions for my foot issue, which so far seem to have worked! Who knew that running could be so technical - high cadence, low HR, feet on rails, head up and shoulders back became my new mantra, I even bought a metronome!

This is where the benefits of HR training really came through; we were able to gauge how I was recovering and what I was capable of/ok to do.

It’s been a long(ish) road and there have been dark days where I’ll be totally honest that I’ve even cried. I thought my LakesMan target was out the window. My fitness seemed to have been knocked back to 2019 and instead of “improving” I was fighting just to get back to where I was in October 2021!

It turns out the guy in the podcast was right - it took 9 weeks for me to get back to where I was pre-Covid. But I got there with the help and encouragement of Coach Paul who tells me that my LakesMan target is very much still achievable – so bring on 19 June 2022!

The medal below is the last one I received in 2021, when I ran a HM PB....lookingforward to many more!!