Prince George triathlete Angela Naeth triumphs over injuries, Lyme disease
Credit to Author: Cayley Dobie| Date: Mon, 30 Dec 2019 18:18:19 +0000
PRINCE GEORGE — Angela Naeth doesn’t play baseball but it would not be a stretch to call her the queen of the curveball.
The past two years of her life as a world-class professional triathlete have been hit with a devastating series of pitches that threatened to end her career but she stubbornly refused to step out of the batter’s box and has returned to the top of her game.
Her triumph over the torturous effects of Lyme disease, which at one point left her virtually unable to walk, was confirmed Sept. 29 when the 37-year-old from Prince George won the Little Debbie Chattanooga Ironman in Tennessee, qualifying Naeth for next year’s Ironman world championships in Kona, Hawaii.
Naeth’s symptoms first cropped up late in 2017. She was feeling overly fatigued, had headaches, anxiety and depression and couldn’t seem to shake her intense leg pain. The pain was in her bones and it got so bad she thought she had broken a femur and her hips. She went through MRIs and other medical procedures and a test for Lyme disease came back negative. Believing it was a virus, Naeth was told by one of her doctors to take a year off.
A few months later in April 2018 she went to the doctor who had fixed her foot injury and he referred Naeth to a Lyme disease specialist. After a series of tests it was confirmed she had the tick-borne disease, which also gave her bartonella and babesia co-infections.
“I must have gotten bitten by a tick at some point, I do remember scratching something off the back of my head,” Naeth said.
She was put on heavy does of antibiotics and her symptoms eventually disappeared. She returned to racing and in 2018 had five podium finishes in Ironman and 70.3 (half-Ironman) races and won the Lobsterman and Boston triathlons, which led into the Ironman world championship in Kona, Hawaii.
“I felt great, I placed eighth in Kona, honestly, the most fulfilling race of my career,” Naeth said.
In January she went to a training camp in Florida and felt her symptoms coming back.
“Sometimes what happens with Lyme is the bacteria gets in your system and it’s sometimes not known if you get rid of it all,” she said. “So when you go through stressful periods there’s a chance for Lyme to build back up and it will take over your system again and basically that’s what happened.”
She was put on another intense round of antibiotic treatments. One of the drugs affected her blood pressure and in late-May she fainted while training, fell and broke her wrist. It was not a clean break and required emergency surgery, but two weeks later a doctor in Colorado determined she needed another operation to fully repair the break. Forced to wear a bar to immobilize her arm, Naeth missed most of the summer race season and still hadn’t qualified for Kona. She raced in Denmark at Ironman Copenhagen in August and finished fourth but needed to place at least third to earn her qualifying spot. However, her Chattanooga win means she will get to race in Kona next December.
“It’s just a sigh of relief in a sense that now I have a full year to get ready for this race and do the best I can,” she said. “It was an amazing experience (in 2018) and I’d be happy just starting again so I’m super-excited about being there and trying to give it my all.
“The great thing about this sport is you can be a professional for a long time. I started in my late-20s and you really have an avenue to make a living and have fun with it.”
Naeth’s first world championship in 2015 came less than two weeks after tearing a tendon in her foot. She was in sixth place after the 3.9-kilometre swim and 180 km bike when her injury forced to pull out of the race heading into the 42.2 km run.
Her eighth-place finish in 2018 marked the third time in her 12-year pro career she’s broken the nine-hour Ironman barrier. She first accomplished that in 2014 in her first win at Chattanooga and also dropped below nine hours in 2015 in Texas while winning the North American championship.
Naeth’s battle with infection is an ongoing process. She went back to her doctor a month ago and found out the bartonella infection is still present.
“Ticks can carry eight-to-10 different types of bacteria and give them to their hosts, and so many people go undiagnosed,” she said. “You could have headaches and someone treats you for headaches or you could have sore legs and someone treats you for fibromialgia or even (multiple sclerosis), it’s not something that’s well-understood.
“The biggest thing is to be your own self-advocate. Always get more than one opinion, get a second and third opinion and figure out all you can with it. The standard medical system does not know about Lyme. So if you have symptoms that are odd, look into finding a Lyme literate medical doctor because those guys have gone above and beyond in terms of the science and diving into the infections themselves.”
Naeth and her boyfriend/coach, Tim Snow, have home bases in Massachusetts and Colorado. They came to Prince George for the holidays to spend a week with her parents, Kim and Don, and sister Miranda. The family is already making plans to head to Penticton in August to watch Naeth race in the Subaru Ironman, which returns to the Okanagan after seven years based at Whistler.
Naeth, a Prince George Secondary School graduate, has started her own triathlon team – I Race Like a Girl – and now coaches more than 300 triathletes around the world. She travels around North America putting on instructional camps and offers online training programs and challenges to build a supportive network for female triathletes, which she found lacking in her own life while she was making the climb to the top of the world ranks.
“I would love to coach triathletes in Prince George,” said Naeth.