Running Sans Erythrocytes

I wasn’t on top form when my alarm went off on Saturday morning but by lunchtime I was beginning to contemplate an intermediate distance run along the river. By 3 in the afternoon as I started seeing signs of everyone else’s stronger commitment, I felt it was time to take the Garmin out for some fresh air.

I gave blood on Thursday evening and was intrigued to see what affect it would have on my running. I always feel good after blood doning but I suppose it’s going to impair my oxygen carrying ability for a while and that run was awful!
Awful I say.
My shins were screaming all the way and at the 3k mark I had to bail out. My stomach was in a terrible bad way as well and I just had to crawl back home to my bathroom. Now I’m sure my stomach issue probably had a lot to do with the previous evenings hydration choices but the shin pains could be related to the blood donation.

I had a hang dog attitude for the rest of the day, I hate bailing on runs. I’ve just checked it out though and apparently it take 4 weeks to replace all the red blood cells and eight weeks to restore the iron lost after donating so maybe I could cut myself some slack.

This morning I intended to make amends but I started the day playing with a little chum. After a couple of hours of the exciting door pushing game, he looked like this. I would have liked to look like that but had to go out and run around the hilliest park in the universe.

Darn half-marathon training.

I left the hypnosis tapes at home but unfortunately I messed up with my recording of the Archers and had to fall back on some emergency running motivation.

Feel free to have the soundtrack running in the background – go on you’ll love it!
It’s got quite a catchy beat and it nicely matched the rattling coming from my rucksac. For some reason I have taken to running with a book and a puncture repair kit in my bag and the overall effect left me convinced that I had a bunch of marines running behind me.

44 tracks of that ilk drove me absolutely nuts but I couldn’t really moan too much about my poorly shins with the drill instructor threatening to call me a pussy if I dropped the pace. If I’d been running with a rifle though I’d probably have blasted the iPod. New inspiration required for next week.