Suzy Bolt's Blog

I've been working in the Long Covid, post viral, post vaccine injury space for three years now. This isn’t something I ever imagined I would end up doing, its just evolved organically with the combination of my skills, professional interests/expertise and of course, the lived experience of getting sick and then instead of getting better after my first covid infection, I got worse. Much worse.

Just prior to lockdown in 2020 I set up an online fitness and wellbeing programme to help us through what I imaged would be a tricky few months. I wanted to offer work to my fellow instructors who didn’t have a mailing list or the tech to create their own online offering quickly as well as wanting personally to have a community of people I could hang out with legitimately every day to exercise with and talk about what was happening. It was fun, exhilarating and we made sure that we laughed, a lot with the friends and family that joined us daily for our dose of connection and joy.

When I got sick the programme kept running and I slowly crumbled under the combination of post covid complications and exercise - such a terrible combo we know now! In September of that year, driven my my own health needs, the online programme started to shift its offering to help others in the recovery space, mainly because I knew in every cell of my being, that connection with others who understood was vital for my own recovery to happen. I needed gentle classes to repair the damage to my body so I created them on may own timetable. The rest repair recover membership was launched with a few classes dedicated to helping the nervous system repair and acted as a life raft to many who were also floating around in the sea of no support or advice.

Fast forward to today, Autumn 2023 and the programme offers a huge range of classes all geared up to support the recovery journey of people from all sorts of things - mostly from post viral (predominately still Covid) illnesses but also post operative, chronic fatigue, post cancer treatment and burnout/mental and nervous exhaustion.

We’ve now had thousands of people through the programme - some stick around as they love it - for others they join us for a while until they can leave their homes and get out to groups in their own community. What ever works for the individual - but no one is too unwell to join us so we often get people in bed logging in for company. One of the features of the RRR is that we have support in the form of group discussion, teachers tips and connection via a dedicated Facebook group. There’s always someone responding 24/7.