COVID, Long COVID & Our Community of Athletes Why it Still Matters

Aaron Teasdale cycling pre-COVID.

Photo courtesy of Aaron Teasdale.

"Out with my sons again!" Teasdale in this selfie is finally getting to be active with his sons once again on his road to recovery.

Willing to share the personal and the difficult because it still matters: an athlete long-term sidelined by Long COVID, a year in bed.

Photo courtesy of Aaron Teasdale.

Posted Tuesday, March 4, 2025 12:28 pm

Aaron Teasdale’s Long COVID Ordeal

I was essentially in bed for the next year, wrecked in ways I never imagined were possible. It felt as if every atom in my body was weighted by a lead blanket too heavy for me to move. It’s a level of cellular fatigue that is impossible to understand, I think, unless you feel it. As someone who craved adventure and thrived on physically pushing myself in the mountains—on snow, singletrack, the river, and the wildest places I could find—the inability to even walk to the end of my driveway without my heart rate skyrocketing was devastating. But it was the cognitive breakdown that was even scarier. I literally couldn’t think. I’m a writer and I couldn’t think of words from my basic vocabulary. Writing a page in my journal could leave me exhausted and unable to function for the rest of the day.

After trying every imaginable medication to heal, with the help of a doctor, at a Long COVID clinic, I started to see slight improvement after one year when I started a daily breathwork practice to reset my autonomic nervous system, which had been completely scrambled. A few months later, I’d carefully built myself up—by gradually re-wiring my injured nervous system—to gentle skiing again, which caused me literal tears of joy.

The year-plus since then has been a gradual recovery marked by long plateaus and occasional setbacks. I believe this illness to be what’s known as an acquired brain injury that throttles our central nervous system. It’s been shown that COVID infiltrates our brain and nervous system, as anyone who has lost their taste or smell can attest. Recovery then requires healing our nervous system and our brain, which can take time and unremitting, gentle-yet-persistent effort, and an intentional neurological re-wiring, similar to what someone recovering from a stroke may deal with. Unfortunately, doctors don’t understand how to do this, so we’re left to fend for ourselves in a kind of Recovery Wild West teeming with desperate patients, hucksters, and poisonous pessimists.

Despite what some people will tell you, recovery is possible—I’m proof. Based on the much higher amounts of serious illness and death it produces, COVID is not a cold and not the flu, and anyone who says it is truly doesn’t know what they are talking about.

By Kierstin Kloeckner

Writing an article about something most are exhausted talking or hearing about isn’t easy, but sometimes it needs to be done.
Over the past 4.5 years, I have been working with and caring for athletes and clients who have experienced COVID—most multiple times. Because our entire lives were changed and shaped by the first 1 to 2 years of the pandemic, many got to the point of not wanting to deal with it any longer and brush COVID aside as if it were on the same playing field as a basic cold or flu. Over the years, however, I’ve encountered more and more people, many otherwise healthy with no known underlying health issues, who are suffering from something much bigger than a cold or flu.
Long COVID, or Long Haul COVID, is something rarely talked about in the sports world, and that’s pretty terrifying when you hear about how it affects people.
I write this not to fearmonger or preach. I write this to shed light on what many are going through and why we shouldn’t sweep the conversations under a rug and pretend COVID today and going forward is nothing serious. After all, when a recent study in BMC [BioMed Central] Infectious Diseases states that across eighteen universities, 4 percent of their athletes who tested positive for COVID between the spring of 2020 and spring of 2021 suffered from long COVID, we need to be aware of what this may mean.
Another study published by The Physician and Sportsmedicine (journal) in 2024 links a greater risk for athletes participating in sports that have a higher cardiovascular demand (versus other athletes with a lower cardiovascular demand) with a higher risk of Long COVID. This is often the opposite of what we often think and have been told in the past.

For the Sake of Ourselves

As athletes, we frequently have the “tough as nails” approach about ourselves: We think we’re healthier and stronger, physically and mentally, than most, and that we have a rock-solid immune system. For some, that’s the case…until it isn’t.
Aaron Teasdale, a friend who has always been strong in backcountry wilderness travel (skiing, hiking, cycling, and more) was infected with COVID while taking Amtrak across the country on New Year’s Eve 2021 by the Amtrak staff. Teasdale, an adventurer, well-known writer, and someone I look up to, explained his experience with Long COVID as shown in this article’s sidebar.
Teasdale has been working with scientists and physicians around the country on not only who is more susceptible to Long COVID, but also how it affects those who contract it long-term and what is available for treatment. As to athletes who turn their heads away from the warnings, he said, “It has long been recognized by clinicians that Long COVID often strikes athletes the hardest. I was the last person you would have expected to be laid low by COVID.”

Beware the Mild Cases

While it’s true that COVID appears to be mild for many people, we don’t yet fully understand what’s happening “under the hood.” COVID has significant effects on our cardiovascular system. A very fit friend of mine who I’ve climbed and skied mountains with now has a pacemaker and can’t ski at all after his infection. Cardiologists studying COVID’s effects are concerned about what they’re seeing and future repercussions, which could include increased heart attacks and unnecessarily shortened lifespans.
Neurologists share this concern. Studies have shown that COVID infections, even when asymptomatic, reduce the brain’s gray matter by up to 2 to 4 percent1. Many people feel challenges with executive function and the dreaded brain fog, which is much worse than the name implies, for months after otherwise recovering from their infections. Neurologists studying this are worried about increasing rates of early-onset dementia and rising stroke rates. They’re trying to raise the alarm, but few seem to be listening.
COVID may be mild for some people, but not for everyone. A sane society would be taking greater measures to control spread, starting with investments in indoor air ventilation and filtration—in schools, workplaces, and our homes. That this isn’t happening across America is the most potentially self-destructive and myopic thing this side of climate change. It’s also quite easy to be mindful of tight, crowded indoor spaces and mask from time to time when appropriate, and certainly whenever on airplanes or public transportation, which can reduce your risk considerably. You can also eat outside when the weather allows.
When cases go up, as they did during this last summer, I adapt my behavior to reduce my odds of getting infected again. It’s not hard and not much of a sacrifice. Being sick for two years—that’s a sacrifice.
I also have multiple friends who have flown to or from Europe in the past year while testing positive for COVID. That’s very disappointing to me. You never know how many people you may transmit the virus to and how much they might suffer. What if they get sick like I did? What if they get dementia or have a stroke or heart attack in two years? People are still dying from this.

Sadly, Teasdale is not the only athletic friend I know who has suffered from Long COVID. Two other cycling friends of mine, who chose to stay anonymous, had very similar experiences over the past couple of years. Their heart rates would skyrocket with even an easy spin on the bike and both were taken out of group rides, events, and races for over a year. This may seem like a pittance to some, but to have an athlete stay stationary for over a year takes a huge toll on their mental health as well as their physical health.

Professional and Personal Responses

Because I work with those who are immunosuppressed, it’s become my new normal to socialize more outside, wear masks, and not place myself in crowded indoor spaces when the rates are high. I do so because I would feel terrible if I spread something to my clients, but also because my bout with COVID a couple of years ago was a huge wake-up call.
What seemed would be a fast recovery (I tested negative after my five-day dose of Paxlovid), I pushed myself in training too soon. All of the symptoms not only came roaring back, but also with a much greater intensity. They also left me feeling like a waste of a human for weeks.
But I got off lucky.

I was almost 100 percent after a month. But witnessing what friends with Long COVID are going through makes me never want to experience it again. And it has been proven that each time you get COVID, your chances of Long COVID increase.2
With so much still unknown to us, and athletes hating to be sidelined, I think it’s time we examine what we need to do to keep ourselves and others healthy since there is still no cure, and rates are yet again increasing.