Sneaking past exercise intolerance: a happy update

This the best news I’ve got, salvaged from the wreckage of the last year.

Three days ago, I ran five whole kilometres for the first time in several years. Somehow I finally did it, despite the exercise intolerance.

(Reminder: exercise intolerance is feeling excessively nasty after exercise, probably for pathological reasons.)

I’m still reeling from that run, and I seriously doubt that I’ll feel ready for the next run, supposedly due tomorrow. But it’s still a huge win.

I have failed many times to crack 4k while my puzzling illness held me back for the last decade (“it’s like long Covid,” if you’re new here). Mostly I can’t handle more than a couple 3k runs per week, and even that’s rough going. I’m always sore and tired, but I’m even more sore and tired when I try to sustain even that modest intensity.

Title typo! 🤦🏻‍♂️ One minute after publishing, I noticed that I’d used exercise “tolerance” in my title, rather than “intolerance.” It’s fixed in the web version now. But, ugh, too late for the emailed version! Sometimes I just don’t know about newsletters …

So why do it? Why bang my head against that brick wall?

My assumption is that the only thing worse than feeling way too sore and tired all the time is also letting it corrode my fitness. And so my goal is to exercise as much as my strange illness will permit.

And I’m willing to pay a “always sore and tired” tax, up to a point.

But what are my actual limits?

What are my actual limits, and, more importantly, can I change them? Can we fight exercise intolerance with exercise? Is there a pace slow enough that one can beat it? Or at least “fool” it temporarily for a while?

Probably not for severe cases. For milder cases like mine … maybe.

Two past examples of trying:

• I first wrote about the possibility of “sneaking past exercise intolerance” in late 2023. I had just inched my way up to 4k and thought “the next month should be interesting.” And then I crashed hard. And then 2024 was just generally awful and I couldn’t get back to it. My limits got worse, if anything.

• Back in mid-2022, I reclaimed some of my ability to lift heavy things. But, as I wrote, “These workouts are so gruelling for me, their consequences so substantial, that I have started to avoid them.” And I have not been anywhere close to that level of strength training ever since.

I may not be able to sustain this unprecedented new running intensity, but — and this is why I’m daring to call it “good news” — I have already sustained it for a while. 5k is the cherry on top. The real achievement was exceeding 4k — well running past my historical limits — consistently for more than three months now.

So apparently I can lift the exercise intolerance limits … at least a little. I have finally “proven” that it’s possible. I don’t think I have beaten or cured exercise intolerance, not even close — but I think I have demonstrated that I can achieve some fitness goals in spite of it.

How I think I did it

With extremely careful progression and load management: “sneaking” past the limits imposed by exercise intolerance. Carefully and methodically pushing my luck.

For instance, I constantly made minor adjustments to my distance and speed, based on all kinds of signals. Two days late for the next run, but severely sleep-deprived? One less kilometre today, and slower.

Well-rested for once? No lower body pain niggles? Nothing on the calendar I can’t afford to nuke with malaise? Time to push another 200m further than ever before.

Sometimes, trying to figure out what to do, I’d make lists of reasons why it was a good day for a higher dose, or a lower one, trying to figure if they cancelled out, or which was stronger.

And I never increased my distance more than 200m at once. Many times I was surprised how clearly I could feel the consequences of even that tiny increase — about 5% for most of the journey from 3 to 5k. It was always a “good” (scary) reminder of the need for caution.

Speaking of luck

It took about four months to work my way past the old 3k limit, and another two more to get to 5k. And it was quite lucky that I didn’t get derailed by anything for more than a week or two at a time. That’s quite a long time to go without a deal-breaker. Just one cold would have blown the attempt. I would have had to start over.

There was a major shoulder meltdown that derailed my upper body strength training. But nothing derailed my running. This time. So far.

I’m not shooting for 6k

I won’t push my luck any more than I have.

If I can sustain 5k for a while, that is more than enough of a fitness victory for me, for now — especially given how much it costs me.

My goal was to see if it was possible, and to try to be reasonably fit in spite of my health problems. I do not want to push my luck with exercise intolerance so far that I break myself — a “cure” that could be worse than the disease.