Athletes and the COVID Vaccine
Written by Nicole Suss
Moments after the injection.
Let’s face it: many people in the U.S right now are hesitant about receiving the COVID-19 vaccine. And if you’re an athlete sensitive about the possible side effects conflicting with your dedicated training, you face an even bigger dilemma: there’s few studied side effects in the general population, and none for elite athletes. It’s valid to worry about the what-if’s: What if the vaccine makes me too sick to train? How long will I have to recover from the vaccine? Will this affect my fitness? How often do I have to charge the microchips? (TOTALLY just kidding). After all, the COVID vaccine was the brainchild of companies that produced it in record-breaking time and to Americans who have never endured a pandemic, that’s a little…well, scary.
But lucky for readers, I received my first dose of the Moderna vaccine on January 11th and am prepared to detail my symptoms, good and bad, to those accomplished athletes waiting in earnest to hear more about the side effects before getting theirs. So kick back, grab a hydrating athletic beverage, and prepare to say “TMI!” as I cover how my body handled getting injected with the government’s new GPS device (again…just kidding).
As I waited to receive the first dose of Moderna last Monday, I read the Center for Disease Control’s symptom list: pain, swelling, and redness at the injection site, chills, fatigue, fever, and headache that were signs your body was building protection and would disappear in a few days. Sounded simple. The injection itself felt like any other vaccine and the immediate effects were…unremarkable. I felt so good, in fact, that three hours later I was in the swimming pool putting down a couple thousand yards to prevent any soreness that I might get the following day. The only indication that I had received a new vaccine at all was slight shortness of breath during the evening. I signed up for the CDC’s “v-safe” after vaccination health checker to report my symptoms during the next week (I’m all about servicing research data, especially since I was blessed to receive the vaccine as a first responder) and checked boxes like, “I have mild pain in my arm” and “the pain has not limited me from daily activities.”
I was cocky to take the initial few hours after the injection as a golden pass to no soreness, however, because the following morning’s pain was akin to getting hit in the arm with a baseball bat. Upon waking, the pain was so intense I expected to look down and see an unrecognizable blob of a bicep, but everything looked…normal. No redness and only a small amount of swelling.
I managed to get on the treadmill for a relaxing and otherwise successful four-mile recovery run, then joined a group of riders on Zwift for a virtual race in the evening. As a disclaimer, I haven’t been on the bike much in the last month since I had a surgery to remove a ruptured cyst in my groin, then another surgery to remove infected stitches a few weeks later (cue the first “TMI!”). So I was prepared for my bike fitness to be mediocre in comparison to the prior few months. What I was not prepared for, however, was the extreme drag I would get in putting down threshold numbers for any period during the race. My heart rate skyrocketed, my legs would not respond, and I was forced to back off to around 1.5 w/kg near the 40-minute mark. I was absolutely crushed, especially after feeling perfectly normal on my run a few hours before. Not someone to see the obvious right away, I chalked it up to weakened bike fitness and walked away with my ego damaged.
Wednesday. That’s when everything came to a head. I woke up exhausted, nauseous, with stomach pain and an arm that I couldn’t raise above my head (I actually hissed at my husband when he reached out to touch my upper arm). I sat on the treadmill, shoes in hand, for 30 minutes before deciding I was too tired to even granny jog for a few miles. I cancelled my evening swim and spent the rest of the afternoon on the couch, moping about my body’s ability to recoil from a vaccination that was only supposed to cause me a fever and some chills, neither of which I had. On the “v-safe” tracker, I checked the available boxes: Nausea, fatigue, pain, stomach pain, all at a moderate to extreme intensity. Looking back, I combatted the pains I felt with 600mg of ibuprofen, but nothing could touch the nausea or the fatigue – not even the CDC’s recommendation to “drink plenty of fluids” (is that the cure for everything now?)
If you know me, you know I don’t cancel my workouts for things like fatigue or cramps (Amirite, ladies?). But this was a different kind of fatigue, like the type you’d have after 13 hours on a race course or after a 150x100m swim workout (I’ve done both). I started to take refuge in that dark place in the mind everyone has – the “are you sure you’re not being dramatic? It was just a vaccine that the CDC said would give you symptoms only until the 48-hour mark. Maybe you’re dying.” Luckily, Wednesday was the darkest day, both physically and mentally before I started to see change. I biked for 45 minutes and ran a moderate four miles on Thursday without the previously mentioned symptoms, but dealt with some explosive diarrhea that seemed to come from nowhere (and cue “TMI!” number two). Friday was a different story. Although I woke up without fatigue, pain, or nausea, I still managed diarrhea before getting on the treadmill for a 2x(5x2mins)/2 mins deoxygenation run (see our website for more info on the Moxy device and deoxygenation training). In the last few weeks, I’ve successfully completed similar intense workouts with progressively decreasing oxygenation numbers from workout to workout, so my expectation for this one was, well, similar. It was clear in the first few intervals that neither my mind nor body was ready for that kind of intensity so closely following the COVID-19 vaccine. My form and my core felt floppy and unsupported, my legs began giving me the sad puppy dog look at interval two, and all sounds and cues that tell me I’m still alive floated away near the halfway mark. Additionally, my muscle saturation numbers refused to decrease below the mid-50’s, no matter the stimulus my coach tried (hill sprints and varying paces). It was time to throw in the towel with some straightforward conclusions.
My soul’s already left my body here.
The outward symptoms from the COVID-19 vaccine were manageable by all means. They were less intense, stuck around for a shorter time, and I’m sure don’t compare to having the actual deadly virus (I’ll say “no, thanks” to the possibility of being on a respirator or having to cut training for several months any day).
But…
That doesn’t mean there weren’t underlying processes my body underwent to ensure protection against the real deal. Those processes showed up in more than the arm soreness that followed the injection, including a telltale resistance against intense training, but a strange acceptance of easy to moderate training of any duration. Each day is moderately better, and the important lesson to take away from this experience (if you’re still here after the diarrhea paragraph) is that patience will be the key following your vaccine. Especially if you’re an elite athlete or are used to uniformity in training, this vaccine has the possibility of putting you on your butt for a day or two.
Another disclaimer: everyone has a different chemical makeup and responses to these kinds of things, so the above symptoms do not accurately demonstrate a consistent outcome for every human being, athlete or non-athlete. As one of the first groups of Americans that received their COVID-19 vaccine dose, I wanted to share my experience to prepare you (and hopefully encourage you) to move forward to get your vaccine when the time comes. Let’s do what we can to get back to racing, get back to seeing each other in person, and get back to a normal that doesn’t include those God-awful elbow bumps.