Things were going so great. I was able to complete all of my training, I was even cross training, and wait for it…I did that damn Yoga for Runners DVD again. Then I went for my annual physical. Everything was great except for one oh tiny, but oh so major issue, my iron was critically low.

Now I knew that I had been struggling through some long runs in the sense that I just couldn’t seem to get my pace to pick up. No matter how diligently I trained and making sure that I did my cross training and got my rest days nothing would improve. I just thought it had to do the weight gain I had and that as soon as I lost it all everything would kick in.

So now I know why my time never improved but how to go about correcting the anemia.

Turns out that had a solution as well and no it did not involve eating raw steak, although some friends would say that my tendency towards rare steaks would qualify as raw. Anyway, I was immediately started on iron infusions. This is a good thing because if I wasn’t so healthy in other areas I would have been sent to the hospital right away for a blood transfusion.

One of my first iron infusions. It’s like a hookah lounge for iron. Lounge and snacks provided! (c) Stacey Cooper

The first couple of weeks I was going twice a week lasting approximately 30 minutes each. I’m now down to once a week and my numbers are improving steadily. I’ll hopefully have one or two more infusions before I go on a maintenance program. I do know why this happened and it is nothing I did wrong but I’m not going to share those details with the entire world.

But man, iron is my new super drug!

After being sidelined for two weeks until my levels got back up to decent levels I was cleared to run but only short easy runs. That meant my 10 mile long run, my longest for this weekend’s half marathon was out. The good news is that I am now able to run faster and it seems easy.

My pace for a 5k has improved by 2:30 to 3:00 minutes!

I have no idea how my races for this weekend’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Virginia Beach series will go. I’m doing both the 5k and Mile on the Beach races in Saturday and the half on Sunday. But I figure that running eight miles with critically low iron might be the equivalent of running 10 with a decent amount of iron in your system.

So my moral of the story for this is to be healthy and get an annual physical.

I’ll keep you all posted about the races this weekend!