trihead -

Thanks for your post. I'm a 33-year-old man recently diagnosed with myasthenia gravis. No fantastic success stories yet but this is all pretty new to me. I practice mixed martial arts but haven't been attending much since my symptoms showed up. The double vision means I get hit a lot, but I hope that practice with one eye closed will allow me to compensate to some extent (or that the mestinon will restore my vision - no luck yet but I've been on it less than a week). More worrisome is my quick muscle fatigue/weakness, mainly in the right shoulder. I think that could be dangerous if my sparring partners are doing arm/shoulder submissions and expect a certain level of strength and technicality from me. I'm going to ease back into it and discuss with the people I practice with. There's a great team spirit at my dojo and we all help each other improve, so as long as people are conscious of these issues we should be able to keep it fairly safe. And I'll sit out some exercises if I simply can't participate.

I have thymoma as well so will need surgery. Obviously I won't be able to work out while I recover from that, although I don't know the details yet.

The post above about not swimming is discouraging as I sometimes swim laps (badly) for cardio. I think it's safe enough in my case as the pool I use is less than 5' deep for its entire length as mentioned the only limb weakness I've had so far has been in the shoulders (mainly right shoulder). But I'll definitely keep that in mind when it comes to ocean or lake swimming.

Good luck with the triathlons and marathons. I hope you can post your own success stories or trials & tribulations in training.