At 49, he was in the best shape of his life. After living with long COVID for 5 years, he's making the ultimate comeback.

Five years ago, Joe Farina was looking forward to his 50th birthday. The former competitive boxer took an interest in powerlifting as a means of continuing the drive to strength train. Farino was training six days a week, spending about an hour to two and a half hours each day in the gym. “I was really in some of the best shape of my life,” Farino told Yahoo News. He said he had no preexisting health conditions, wasn’t on any medication and didn’t have any restrictions to manage his health. In fact, Farino was just weeks away from competing in his very first powerlifting competition.

And then in March 2020, he was part of the first wave of people in the United States to get sick with COVID-19.

“When you look back on it, it was a crazy time period where no one really knew what was happening,” Farino said. At the time, he was working as a Starbucks field leader for training and development and was trying to help various stores and managers navigate store protocols because of so many unknowns about the virus. Because of the line of work he was in, Farina said at some point he “came across the virus and didn’t know it.”

Farino said his symptoms started off as a cold but ultimately mushroomed into something bigger. As a person who prides himself on having a great tolerance for pain as an athlete, “it was the worst thing I have ever been through,” he recalled. “It felt like you were drowning 24 hours a day … my breathing was extremely bad.”

One of the scariest moments for him within a week of initially contracting the virus was when he collapsed at home at the end of March 2020. He was rushed to the hospital and had to be revived. Farina said he's thankful he never had to be intubated or be placed on a ventilator, but he was placed in full oxygen headgear as hospitals were still navigating how to treat and fight the virus.

When Farina got out of the hospital and began the recovery process, it was an unexpected uphill battle. Several weeks later, he still felt like he couldn't catch his breath, even after doctors told him he should be free of the virus by this point.

“You felt like you had a migraine every day; the fog was never-ending. You couldn't concentrate, you couldn't see straight, you didn't want to eat,” he said. “The bed was your sanctuary.”

This is when he started experiencing a new slew of symptoms out of the blue. “For me, you were seeing the weird blood pressure, the tachycardia and the atrial fibrillation and the mini strokes, for no reason. I could be sitting on the couch watching television and my blood pressure would spike to 180 over 120.”

By the fall of 2020, Farina ended up in the hospital for a second time — even longer than the first — after he had a temporary blockage of blood flow to the brain. After that he decided to switch providers. “I think some doctors weren't ready to fully grasp or fully accept what was happening … that's when, quite frankly, I changed all of my physicians,” he recalled.

Farina was experiencing what is known as long COVID, a chronic condition that happens after being infected with COVID-19 and lasts for at least three months. According to a 2021 study published in the Lancet’s eClinical Medicine Journal, there can be more than 200 symptoms spanning 10 organ systems associated with long COVID. One of the main frustrations among “long haulers” has been that health care providers couldn’t provide answers or their symptoms weren’t being taken seriously.

Five years later, Farina now has a general practitioner, cardiologist and neurologist who he says are “phenomenal” and “were doing things to help themselves understand it.”

“They really began to try to plot for me a recovery program that was both medication-driven and physically driven with rehabilitation and relaxation techniques,” he said. He was once on a total of seven medications, and now he’s down to five.

Now, like the true fighter he is, Farina is making the ultimate comeback — and giving back.

With the clearance and monitoring of his doctors, Farina said his daughter Lauren reminded him that their goal was to do a powerlifting meet together.

Last summer, he started training for his first-ever powerlifting event, with Lauren as one of his coaches.

In October, he competed in a masters powerlifting competition while still tempering his expectations. “I hit eight out of my nine lifts, and I came away with a medal in my weight class.” Farina had just accomplished — and smashed — what he set out to do before he became ill with COVID-19 in March 2020.

He was so stoked that he wanted to achieve even more. In February, he went on to train for and compete in an open lift, which is an even bigger competition. Farina took home a gold medal, with “Coach Lauren” by his side again.

“My identification totally switched from someone who's battling a chronic illness to, ‘I'm an athlete and I am training and I am prepared,’” Farina said. “That has done more for me in my recovery than anything else could possibly have done.”

Farina and his daughter are now preparing for their first father-daughter powerlifting meet this summer.

His journey has come full circle in more ways than one. He went back to school to study food science and safety and is now an emergency medical technician on a company campus that made some of the therapies that have helped save his life. “This was an opportunity to help people and do something where maybe I could help out the people that helped me,” Farina said. He also wanted to “pay tribute to the first responders that showed up for me in my time of need.”

While he still experiences long COVID symptoms every day, Farina said, “I think one of the paths that has helped is, I've accepted me.”

“You have to understand that you're going through this every day and that every day you're going to have some kind of battle with it,” Farina said. “You go through a plethora of anger, frustration, despair, sadness. It's like going through the grieving process on yourself.”

He credits the help, love and support that he has received from his wife, two daughters and friends. But the one mantra he repeats to himself about long COVID is: “This will not win today.”