Adventures with Iron Deficiency, Part 3

(Once more for those in the back -- I AM NOT A DOCTOR OR NUTRITIONIST. I basically just read the internet. Below is what worked for me, but that doesn't mean everyone should do it, and you should definitely *definitely* not start taking an iron supplement without having your levels checked because you CAN get iron poisoning, and some people have a condition that keeps their iron levels abnormally high. Just sayin'.)

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We've been talking iron deficiency (not the same thing as anemia) this week on the blog. You might want to catch up on Part 1 & Part 2 before dividing into Part 3, in which we talk about how I ultimately fixed my low ferritin issues.

Adventures with Iron Deficiency, Part 1

Adventures with Iron Deficiency, Part 2

When we left off, I'd just learned about a month before the Boston Marathon that my ferritin was at 13 ng/mL. Normal for sedentary couch potato pre-menopausal women is 12-300 ng/mL, but female athletes training a lot--particularly runners--generally need to be around 30 ng/mL at a bare minimum and many feel weak and exhausted unless they're closer to 45 or 60.

I'd also learned that raising low ferritin numbers often requires getting 60-180 mg of iron a day (four to 12 times the couch potato recommendation of 15 mg per day) and I'd been eating more like 22 mg. And, also, that it's virtually impossible to consume this much iron through food alone. Ergo, supplements.

Adventures with Iron Deficiency, Part 2

(Once again: I am not a doctor, nutritionist, dietitian, coach, etc. and have absolutely no formal training whatsoever in medicine, diet, sports training, etc. and probably no one should listen to me about anything. Everything I know, I've learned from reading or talking either to people who ARE experts or other female runners who have had similar experiences. This entire blog is just Some Lady Rambling on the Internet and if you are getting your medical and/or training advice from me something in your life has gone very, very wrong; please go pay an actual expert actual money.)

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So, last time we were talking about iron deficiency--what it is, and why runners (especially female runners) might care. You can read Part 1 where I discuss my first experience dealing with iron deficiency & some things I learned about it here.

All caught up? Excellent!

Fast forward to about a month before the Boston Marathon. In my first couple months of training I felt amazingly good--workouts were easy, and I had no trouble hitting the mileage. After that (as you know if you've been following along), I had some injuries and got really sick one week, so I would never in a million years have thought that I was training hard enough to mess with my iron levels.

Still, I kept getting that same feeling I remembered from when I was training for Eugene; just exhausted all the time, hitting workout paces starting to feel way, way too hard (and for the first time I can ever remember, sometimes actually impossible), and that sleep-deprived/low-blood-sugar, knock-me-over-with-a-feather feeling while running, even just on short easy runs.

For a while I was chocking it up to stress, losing fitness from all the missed miles, and maybe just getting old. But chatting about it with Don one day, he was like, "When was the last time you had all your blood work checked? Could it be iron or thyroid or something?"

Adventures with Iron Deficiency, Part 1

(Super obvious disclaimer: I am not a doctor, nutritionist, dietitian, coach, etc. and have absolutely no formal training whatsoever in medicine, diet, sports training, etc. and probably no one should listen to me about anything. Everything I know, I've learned from reading or talking either to people who ARE experts or other female runners who have had similar experiences. This entire blog is just Some Lady Rambling on the Internet and if you are getting your medical and/or training advice from me something in your life has gone very, very wrong; please go pay an actual expert actual money.)

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People didn't talk much about iron levels when I was in high school and college. Or, at least, not my particular circle of runners & coaches. In fact I don't think I ever even had mine tested until I got a summer job running the barn at a Girl Scout horseback riding camp in college, and I had no idea what the numbers meant or even what the deal with low iron really was, except for some vague notion of how iron bonds to oxygen and that's why you need it to make red blood cells. Which, y'know. Sounds important. But wasn't exactly something I worried about.

My next encounter with iron talk was many, many years later, reading running blogs by people way, way, WAY faster than me (like RoseRunner, and Kris Lawrence, and Camille Heron), how they'd started generally feeling shitty on their runs while training hard, and so the doctor said, "You know, let's just check your iron just to be safe." It was't a problem I was personally having at the time, but I guess I must have put a mental pin in it to revisit if it seemed relevant.

So, a few years later, while I was training for the Eugene Marathon, I started feeling just really awful. Like tired and cold all the time even when there was no good reason for it, and so many runs, even short easy ones, where I felt like I might fall over at any moment. The way I tried to describe it to my doctor was that it felt like being sleep deprived and low blood sugar at the same time, only it happened when I was definitely definitely not either of those things. Also my workouts were just a slog. I could hit the times still, usually, but felt like I was dragging myself through them & when I got home I just wanted to lay on the couch and not move.