COVID, Body Image, and Tisha B’Av: How I Watched the Olympics with Exercise Intolerance
CW: Discussion of disordered relationship to food
Before Long COVID took over my body—my immune system, lungs, nervous system, heart, my liver, my muscles, (and yes just one infection will impact all these and more)—I was a fairly athletic person. For most of my life I was a ballet dancer. I trained seriously in high school and had professional ambitions until an injury stopped me from walking; I had grown an extra bone in my ankle, and my Achilles tendon was affected. I was forced to pause, step back and look around. That is when I noticed what I had been doing to myself, to my body.
It isn’t easy to admit that you have a disordered relationship to food, but even more challenging is finding a way to recovery. For me, the concept of B’tzelem Elohim, that we are all created “in the image of God” was comforting, but what compelled me to care for my physical self was the concept that my body was to be returned to God. While for some, this idea can be anxiety-inducing, and for many this is in part why tattoos and piercings are considered taboo, for me the idea feels liberating. If my body is a temporary rendering of a soul, it is my responsibility to care for it the best I can, not to force upon it any particular set of norms, but to honor its needs and limits. And yes, I have tattoos and piercings; to me adornment is not equivalent to abuse.
Slowly, and by no means linearly, I began to heal my relationship with food, and to exercise in a new way.
It was only in 2023, when I developed Long COVID, that I realized I wasn’t as recovered as I had told myself. In fact, much of my recovery was dependent on my ability to exercise. It’s so easy to tell yourself that you’ve achieved body neutrality and acceptance when you still have some level of influence over the shape and strength of your muscles. But what happens when you’re forced to give up the illusion of control, when you cannot exercise to mediate your relationship with embodiment or cope with the way fat women are treated in the world? If body positivity is about loving our appearance, and body neutrality “encourages an appreciation for the mere function and existence of the human body,” as Hannah Meyer wrote for Lilith in 2022, what is a feminist, Jewish orientation to the body that does not function, that dysfunctions, that once functioned and is seemingly losing its functionality over time?
It felt different to watch The Olympics this year. It’s not only a reminder of the incredible variety of the human body, but of its fragility. While some, like gymnast Rebecca Andrade, can recover from three ACL tears in four years, and others, like Simone Biles, can recover from the mental blockage of “the twisties” and come back stronger than ever, these Olympics put each and every athlete’s long-term health at risk.
We know, despite the failure of the Olympic Committee to introduce any protocols around reporting, COVID took many athletes out of their events, including German decathlete Manuel Eitel who dropped out of the Paris Olympics, British rower Oonagh Cousins who qualified for Tokyo but has been unable to exercise since developing Long COVID in 2020, and Priscilla Loomis, a high jumper who represented the U.S. in 2016 but failed to qualify for Tokyo after developing COVID. Just before the 100-meter breaststroke final, Adam Peaty began feeling ill. He tested positive for COVID less than 24 hours after securing his silver medal.
Noah Lyles, a track and field athlete, competed in his event though he knew he had an active COVID infection. Like Peaty, he endangered the lives of the athletes around him as well as those working the Olympics, his own coaches, and fans. When the Olympics were taking place largely unmasked and with minimal COVID precautions (including no requirement to test) it is unsurprising that the spread of COVID impacted athletes. What I find disturbing is our collective apathy and ongoing denial about the consequences to the lives of millions, including the athletes themselves. Lyles, who ran with a 102° fever, put his own health at risk by ignoring the guidance and wisdom of those with ME/CFS (myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome) and other post-viral illnesses that exercise should not be returned to until one has made a full recovery from COVID. Even then, exercise must be approached at a slower and gentler pace. While the CDC and WHO are failing to properly warn us of the dangers of COVID infections and the possibility of long-term disability, those of us with Long COVID can only hope to be heard when we beg you to wait at least six weeks before getting back to any kind of exercise.
I am not the first to say that I would not be surprised if a year or two from now, Lyles is not able to run and Peaty cannot swim. Exercise intolerance—one aspect of Post-Exertional Malaise (PEM)—is not a symptom I would wish on anyone.
For me, exercise was a means of coping with embodiment, a source of joy and expression, and a place to mourn. Now, rather than cycling the ~200 mile Pan Mass Challenge (a fundraising bike-a-thon that benefits the Dana–Farber Cancer Institute) in memory of my father, I mourn my ability to cycle at all. Rather than celebrating my size and reclaiming my relationship to dance in queer and inclusive spaces like Ballez, I am left winded and tachycardic after a single flight of stairs. If I do exert myself physically, I risk not only the possibility of struggling through weeks of fatigue, pain, and migraines, but also lowering my baseline overall.
Recently, I had the pleasure of joining Sins Invalid, a “disability justice based performance project” for a virtual gathering, “Mask Decoration to Honor Collective Loss.” In this workshop, access was the organizing principle, not an afterthought the way was at the Paris Olympics, and there was room to mourn the people we have lost in the ongoing COVID pandemic, as well as the less concrete losses we endure along the way. These losses, the intangible, disenfranchised losses, can be difficult to contend with in a society that has little room for grief beyond the scope of a loved-one’s death. One facilitator, though, suggested the use of Tisha B’Av and The Nine Days as a portal for disenfranchised grief. It was with this suggestion in mind that I sewed resin letters spelling “freedom” onto the pink mask to be displayed later this year at a Sins performance in San Francisco. It is with this guidance that I will spend Tisha B’Av mourning the loss of my ability to dance for joy and healing, to hike and cycle as medicine, to climb stairs with ease and hold children when they ask to be picked up. I will mourn those who have lost their lives to COVID, those who have been forced to face reinfection due to government neglect, and those like me who are newly or additionally disabled with Long COVID despite taking individual precautions. When the Olympics is able to celebrate the resilience of the human spirit, it is a beautiful thing, but this year I also mourned our collective loss of consciousness—an Olympic celebration that deems the disabled disposable, athletes invulnerable, and hand washing a sufficient defense against an airborne virus, is no celebration at all.
