Gradual Return to play - with Science in Sport
Coronavirus, COVID-19. Pandemic. Lockdown. Weird, strange, and unprecedented times. The most used words of 2020 and I honestly cannot wait until these words are a thing of the past.
I knew that at some point I was likely to come into contact with someone who currently has it, had it or even contracted the virus personally. With that, I questioned whether I would be asymptomatic or symptomatic and present the typical dry cough, loss of smell and taste symptoms. On top of that, I wondered how I would recover from coronavirus both physically and mentally. I have heard mixed stories of athletes not being affected at all by it but others suffering long term effects from having the virus, currently known as Long-Covid.
Before I tested positive for COVID-19, I honestly was not aware that I had it. At the time, I did feel ill and not my usual self, but there were also lots of variables in the mix, so trying to pinpoint a symptom and relate it to the virus was hard, especially when coming out of a big training block.
Let’s start from the beginning on the where, the how, and the when. I was in Livigno in the Italian Alps for an 8-week training block. That was 8 weeks of living and training at altitude of over 1880m, clocking up to 1300 hours of altitude exposure. For those that are not quite sure about living and training at altitude, it adds an additional physiological strain to the body, as there is a decrease in partial pressure of oxygen. In response to this training stimulus your body produces more red blood cells to circulate more oxygen around the body.