For years, by day, Emily Regan outraced everyone, winning four World Rowing Championships and an Olympic gold medal in the women’s eight boat at the 2016 Rio Games.
By night, it was a different story.
“I have this recurring dream occasionally where I’m like trying to run away from something, but something is pulling me back, and you feel like you’re running against resistance,” Regan said. “It’s not super frequent, but I’ve had it a couple of times here and there over the years. It’s hard to explain. It’s like I’m trying so hard but going nowhere.”
In late March, the Buffalo native and her teammates were rounding into peak form at the USRowing Training Center in Princeton, N.J., when the 2020 Tokyo Games were postponed a year because of the novel coronavirus pandemic. Soon, her reality mirrored her nightmares.
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Regan, approaching her 32nd birthday, was quarantined alone in her apartment for nearly two weeks before it began to hurt to breathe. She was one of a dozen teammates to experience symptoms of Covid-19 after coming into contact with a team employee who tested positive.
The most severe symptoms left Regan largely bedridden for two days and struggling to muster the energy to climb a flight of stairs, trying so hard but going nowhere. She’s spent the last three months working to regain her health and resume her training regimen, having been reduced to the athletic ability of an average high school girl, she said, referencing her splits on the “erg” rowing machine.
Regan first detailed her experience and the USRowing outbreak in a Facebook post July 7, offering a cautionary tale about how mild to moderate cases of the virus can affect even the best athletes in the world, physically and mentally.
“As of today, over 3 months after my symptoms went away, I am working on getting back into the shape I was in in early February and March before all of the setbacks. While it only took me a month to feel like I was in my own body again,” Regan wrote, using an eyeroll emoji, “I have teammates who were dealing with complications from COVID for over 2 months.
“So if you don't think the virus is that big of a deal because you are young, healthy, or fit, please consider my story. My guess is that my teammates and I are at a minimum healthier and fitter than most of you and it knocked many of us down hard. I have personally never experienced any other illness like this. I have never been knocked off of my feet for an entire month before.”
Regan wasn’t planning to share her ordeal.
She couldn't even bring herself to tell her parents at first, not with the family worried about her dad’s surgery and the ensuing weeks of radiation to remove the cancer from his face.
“I was here for about six weeks by myself,” Regan said, “and when I woke up with the worst of the symptoms, I actually chose not to say anything to anybody. So it wasn’t until I was feeling better that I texted them, because I didn’t want that to be another stress they had to worry about, which might not have been the smartest thing to do, but there was nothing they could have done to help.
“They were in Buffalo. I was in New Jersey. And I believed that I was going to, in the end, be OK.”
Undocumented
At the time, Regan wasn’t certain she had Covid-19.
The Nichols School graduate and former Michigan State All-American was among the last of her teammates to show symptoms. She never lost her sense of taste or smell. And while an antibody test later came back positive, she was never tested for the virus.
“At that time, you could not get a Covid-19 test unless you were showing three symptoms, unless you had a fever, a cough and shortness of breath,” USRowing high performance director Matt Imes said. “The only testing available was for health care and emergency service providers. You had to be showing severe symptoms of Covid-19 to get the test.”
Three female rowers tested positive for Covid-19.
Nine others, including Regan, were presumed positive, Imes said, meaning most of the team’s infections aren’t reflected in New Jersey's official statistics.
“I sort of tried to convince myself that it wasn’t that,” Regan said. “Honestly, I think that was my coping mechanism. Because I remember the worst day, being like, ‘You’re just hurting because you trained weird yesterday.’ And I tried to convince myself that I wasn’t sick.”
Regan and her teammates had been diligent to avoid contracting the disease.
“We had reduced our group size and stopped rowing in team boats,” Imes said. “We stopped rowing in eights and fours. We reduced it down to two people or less. We were doing social distancing. We had taken our training outside. We weren’t utilizing the boat houses as much. We were doing what we thought was prudent and following all the guidelines and actually doing more than what was asked of us at the time.”
Regan thought she and her teammates were low-risk individuals.
“I couldn't tell you the last time I was at a bar or another crowded place,” Regan wrote. “Everything I do, especially in the Olympic year is all about recovery and being in the best position I can possibly be in to make the team. So my social circle is really small, almost completely limited to my team and USRowing employees.”
When New Jersey issued a stay-at-home order March 21, Regan and her teammates took their rowing machines and weight training equipment home to continue workouts in isolation. She began training on her porch.
Two days later, Regan wrote, she and her teammates received an email stating that a "USRowing employee that most of our team was in close contact with tested positive for Covid."
Regan was instructed to quarantine for two weeks following her last interaction with the employee, who wasn’t exhibiting symptoms when they met three days earlier.
“I started my quarantine and was so thankful that I had done a massive grocery haul a day earlier,” she wrote. "One by one my teammates (ages 23-37) started showing symptoms of the virus.”
Onset of symptoms
Regan began having a difficult time breathing when she increased the intensity of her workouts. She also began sleeping nearly 12 hours a night. But she didn't have a fever.
"So, at the time I attributed the difficulty breathing to erging outside in the cold and the extra sleep to the fact that the Olympics had just been postponed and my entire focus for the last four years was no longer close to 100 days away,” Regan wrote. The Opening Ceremony would have been this week in Tokyo.
Regan texted team doctor Peter Wenger, as instructed, when she first developed a mild fever April 1, the 12th day of quarantine, around the time many of her teammates were beginning to recover from their acute symptoms.
"I genuinely thought it was unlikely that I had Covid because typically people were showing symptoms days 4-5 after exposure,” Regan wrote. “So I thought that the elevated temperature was probably just a fluke. The next morning I woke up, I felt great, and I never had a fever that entire day.
"Friday, April 3rd was a completely different story. I slept over 12 hours that night and when I woke up it was painful to breathe and my entire body ached like I had done something really wrong while I was practicing the day before. That day my fever ranged from about 100.4-101.7. I couldn't walk up a flight of stairs without needing to sit down and take a nap. Not only did I sleep for 12 hours that night, but I also took a 3-hour nap. I was too weak to make myself food that entire day until I forced myself to make pancakes that night because I knew I had to eat something."
Regan spent two hazy days dozing in and out of consciousness, tethered by some invisible force, like in her dreams.
Her fever persisted intermittently for about a week.
“The next night I slept for 12 hours again,” Regan wrote. “It was still painful to breathe and I was still extremely exhausted and unable to do simple household tasks. Thankfully, though, my body aches were gone that day.
“These were the 2 days where I had the worst symptoms, but just because these symptoms improved after 2 days doesn't mean I was fully recovered from COVID. It took the rest of April for me to be able to train normally again.”
'A really weird experience'
Regan took four days off from training and in hindsight wishes she had taken more time.
"When I first started trying to work out again I tried doing a 30-minute jog,” Regan wrote. “My heart rate was really high and I felt like I was running through water. The jog was meant to be light and a small attempt to get my body moving again, but it was so difficult I had to stop after 20 minutes. I am used to doing workouts that range from 80-120 minutes. I don't give up easily and I was just near my peak closing in on final selection for the Olympics. Now I couldn't even jog/walk for 30 minutes."
The next day, she attempted a light workout on the rowing machine.
"The best way I can describe what I was feeling is when you crash and burn on a workout because you didn't fuel your body properly,” Regan wrote. “My legs felt fine, but I felt physically faint and shaky and not ready to do the workout. I completed the workout by taking one stroke at a time and allowing myself to be as slow as I needed to be.
"The entire month of April was a big struggle for me to work out. Things improved to where I was able to work out consistently, but I had to go 10-15 splits slower than I normally would on easy workouts to control my heart rate and make it through workouts. And for reference, 10-15 splits is a ton, that basically meant I was erging at a pace of a slow college student or average high school girl. I still didn't feel like myself and always felt like I was carrying 50 extra pounds when I was working out."
Regan didn't feel right until a run on the morning of May 2.
“All of a sudden, I was not running 10-minute miles anymore,” Regan said, struck by the experience and its similarity to her dreams.
“I was able to run and feel like myself, like I was free. It was a really weird experience, the way it was just, like, better,” Regan said, snapping her fingers. “It was a really nice experience, to be like, ‘Oh, my God!’ When before, it was like, ‘Oh, my God, this is the worst.’ ”
Regan, who originally planned to return home after her quarantine, finally drove the six hours back to Buffalo that weekend.
Like father, like daughter
Larry Regan, 61, had surgery to remove a cancerous growth from his face March 27, three days after the Olympics were canceled. He didn’t learn about his daughter’s illness until later.
“It’s a little bit too much like her dad,” Larry said. “That’s kind of like how I handle things, when I have stuff going on. I try not to tell anybody until everything is taken care of.
“It was disturbing to learn that she had it, but in the context of hearing it, the fact that she was over the worst of it was reassuring. Although with this being so new and not knowing a whole lot about it, it was still obviously a significant concern about what it meant going forward.”
Emily stayed at her brother’s house for the nine weeks she spent in Buffalo, trying to limit exposure to her parents in case she harbored remnants of the disease.
But she visited every day, spending her 32nd birthday floating in their pool – the first time in a decade she was able to spend her birthday relaxing with her family – and talking on the phone with USRowing teammates who’d been through similar ordeals.
“I didn’t realize that I was lonely so much until I came home and was with my family again,” Emily said. “It was a lot for a little bit, but I was able to be home for a while and help my parents out, which was really nice.”
Larry was in the midst of 30 radiation treatments in six weeks.
He had lost his sense of taste, which affected his appetite, which caused him to force himself to eat to maintain weight.
He documented the experience in a lengthy Facebook post on July 2, bemoaning the Klondike bars that had been in the freezer for four weeks, when typically they’d disappear in a day or two at most.
“I am a resource for everyone,” Larry wrote. “If you or someone you know needs radiation feel free to reach out to me. I am here to help anyone who may need it.”
Five days later, once Emily received the positive results of her antibody test and returned to Princeton, she posted about her experience with Covid-19.
“I had no idea she was going to post something on Facebook,” Larry said, “but I’m proud that she did and I’m happy she did, because the reason she shared her experience was to try to let people know that so-called young people can be affected by it in a significant way, even if death isn’t the consequence. Even though we know from all the reporting out there that there unfortunately have been younger people who have died as a result of it.
“There are separate, significant consequences, like lung transplants and permanent lung damage. While it’s a small percentage that have those dire consequences, it’s still possible, so she just wanted to share her experience and let people know it’s important to take it seriously.”
Originally, the privacy setting on Emily’s post was set to “friends,” but once others began sharing it, she changed the setting to public.
It’s since been shared nearly 500 times.
“Once it started going kind of crazy, I don’t think I’ve received one negative comment,” Emily said, “and I’m grateful for that, because when you open up about something, it’s easy for trolls to come in and start saying negative things. That’s been helpful, the fact that it’s been really positive feedback.
“I really hadn’t shared my story with anyone outside of my immediate family, and just as the cases were starting to surge again in the South and the West and the message sort of started becoming, ‘The spread is being driven by young, healthy people; they’re going to be fine,’ that’s when I felt like it might be a good idea for me to open up and share my story.
“I’m thankful that it can hopefully bring awareness to those closest to me, that it does affect real people and people that they know, and to those that maybe don’t know me, that it can have long-term impacts on young, healthy people that are not worth the risk.”
She closed her post with a call to action.
“Please wear a mask to protect yourself and the people around you,” Emily wrote. “I am hoping to donate blood plasma to help a person in need.
“We're all in this together and the more we can do small things the sooner our lives can get back to something resembling normal again.”