By Marina Green

A few months after recovering from COVID-19, Roy Wenzl, 69, stopped all exercise and lived in fear that he might never again take the long walks and bike rides he had enjoyed for decades.

For the Kansas farm boy, who had tossed 70-pound hay bales, played football and run cross country as a youth, and who still zigzagged the country as a journalist, the exhaustion was all-encompassing and terrifying.

He’d never felt anything like the malaise that overpowered him after a short walk and left him struggling despite the help of a cane. It was taking him three minutes simply to get out of a car.

Then came the scary words from his doctor: “Those symptoms sound like what we’re hearing a lot of with long COVID.” The doctor assigned a name to the affliction — PEM or post-exertional malaise — extreme fatigue after even minor physical or mental exercise.

“I thought I was permanently crippled, and it just wasn’t going to go away,” Wenzl said in a recent interview with Surfers & Chess Players.

The Full Scope of COVID-19 is Only Now Coming into View

Wenzl is far from alone. About 16 million people in the U.S. have long COVID and as many as a fourth of them are disabled by it, according to federal estimates. Long COVID can manifest itself with 200 different symptoms.

The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute at The National Institutes of Health (NIH), is conducting a $1.6 billion research project on what causes symptoms of long COVID and possible treatments. Currently, there are no approved therapies.

New research from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and published in Nature Medicine in May, found that even three years after a mild case of COVID-19, people were still experiencing new health problems related to the disease.

“We aren’t sure why the virus’s effects linger for so long,”  senior author Ziyad Al-Aly, MD, a Washington University clinical epidemiologist and a global leader in long COVID research said in a university press release. “Possibly it has to do with viral persistence, chronic inflammation, immune dysfunction or all the above…. I feel COVID-19 continues to teach us — and this is an important new lesson — that a brief, seemingly innocuous or benign encounter with the virus can still lead to health problems years later.”

COVID-19 is a serious threat to long-term health and well-being and shouldn’t be underestimated, Al-Aly warned.

“Three years out, you might have forgotten about COVID-19, but COVID hasn’t forgotten about you,” he said. “Three years after infection, the virus could still be wreaking havoc and causing disease or illness in the gut, lungs or brain.”

Exhaustion Like Never Before

No stranger to medical adversity, Wenzl survived two near fatal pulmonary embolisms in the course of five years. He narrowly escaped death in 2016 and then again in 2021.

But this was different.

The first time he had COVID was in November 2023. It lasted just a week, but the symptoms were extreme. Simply standing up caused his heart to race. He also had a severe case of hives with hundreds of welts all over his body — some the size of a quarter.

He drove himself to the ER where doctors gave him steroids and prescribed Paxlovid. Within six or eight hours, the hives were gone.

For several weeks, he felt like he was OK, but he wasn’t, he now knows.

When January 1 arrived, he got aggressive about exercise — biking, walking and lifting weights several times a week.

“I started walking three miles a day,” he said. “I was stopping every 50 yards to breathe. I didn’t feel right, but I pushed through.”

After doing that for three weeks, he decided he was being lazy and accelerated his exercise regimen. That was when shooting pains hit his thighs, hips and lower back.

Instead of taking it easy, he dug up a garden. But he had to stop about every minute to rest.

He needed a full minute to stand up from the couch, while clinging to nearby furniture for support.

Stiff and in pain, he refused to call a doctor. He tried to ignore the dullness in his muscles, the deep fatigue.

“Am I forever like this, shuffling down the street?” he asked himself.

Will This Ever End?

Finally, in February, he knew he had to talk to a doctor. Again, the doctor prescribed steroids, and this time added muscle relaxers and told him to quit exercising.

The doctor said she was seeing a lot of COVID patients having pain in their large muscles and tendons caused by small blood clots in capillaries. Continuing to exercise could damage the tendons permanently, the doctor warned.

The description of PEM matched Wenzl’s symptoms exactly.

“They told me I needed to focus on pacing, not pushing myself,” Wenzl said.

He stopped all exercise for months.

Then in May, despite rolling up his sleeve for six COVID vaccines since the pandemic began, he caught the virus again. This time it put him down for 3 ½ weeks, with lots of coughing and sneezing.

It was frustrating, because there was so much he wanted to do. The Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and author of two books had stories to write and pictures to take. For instance, he planned to explore the 11,000 acres of Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve in Kansas and use his long lens to shoot pictures of more than 100 bison that roam its grasslands. He wanted to do lots of things.

But as recently as the first week of June, he still had to stop and pant after climbing a dozen steps.

“I was pretty depressed,” he admitted. “I felt like now I’m going to die. It really shook me up.”

But two days before the Surfers & Chess Players interview, he got on his bike and rode for 12 miles. He was sore, but it was a welcome sore — the familiar, old-fashioned kind of sore from before COVID.

He knows now not to push too hard.

“I’m really, really hoping it doesn’t come back,” he said.