A few weeks ago I wrote about a family member having had Covid-19. She is young, fit and healthy, and expected to have a mild case of the disease, but ended up in bed for two weeks. I wrote about how difficult it was to persuade her to rest while she was ill, but the virus has since delivered another challenge.

She was very fit before she caught the virus, exercising almost every day. She went running in the mornings, and went to strength and conditioning classes in the evenings. For her, exercise was a way to feel good about herself, stay physically healthy, and manage stress. It was also a big part of her social life, and one of her main “hobbies” which she told people about when they asked what she did in her spare time.

But Covid-19 changed all this. For two weeks she was unable to spend more than a few minutes at a time out of bed, and then as she gradually recovered, she still felt too weak for strenuous exercise. This long recovery period meant she lost her level of fitness, and several months after her illness she has still not returned to her routine.

Now she is working to bring back her fitness, but spoke to me about feeling frustrated that she had to “start again”, trying to rebuild her ability. It was a familiar story to me, as many people with chronic pain feel as though they lose part of their identity when they can no longer exercise like they used to.

It is often very difficult to “start again” from scratch, for example working hard to walk a few extra steps each day, when in the past a few extra kilometres would have seemed like no challenge. But in my experience the sense of achievement at finally winning some small progress can be very special indeed.