Waiting for My Wings

Lately I’ve been feeling pretty down. Tired, unmotivated, cranky. For the past week, every step of almost every run has been forced and painful. Everyone has those dreams where they are running from something, but aren’t actually going anywhere…well that’s how I feel. When I’m not running, I want to sleep, yet when I try, I can’t fall asleep. Awesome, that’s just great for my training.

I credit this feeling to a variety of causes. It could be the heat, the altitude (5200 feet, mile high baby!), or my stubborn insomnia. Having recently abandoned my coffee addiction cold turkey, it’s feasible that this is what it feels like not to be riding out an adrenaline rush all day. Pumping caffeine all morning will sure make you feel alive, but I’ve decided that it’s peaked at an unnatural level. Its also possible that this is always the mood of July: getting in shape for cross country after having never finished a collegiate track season healthy and in one piece can be a slow process. Lastly, I can’t rule out every distance runner’s nightmare… the condition that makes us wince in terror…the all too common but worse case scenario of the beast eating our body from the inside out. Maybe… just maybe… I’m anemic!

Which would explain why my eyes lit up with animated anticipation when I spotted a package under my Grandma’s arm as she made her five-yard shuffle from her car to our front door with the daily mail. Normally, she slaps a stack of bills and notices on our table, which only deserves a glance from me, only half of a second of my attention before I proceed with the task I was involved in. But this package wasn’t just any daily parcel. It was a box, brown and slightly smaller than a shoebox, with the little Amazon smile-arrow-doodad along the side. Judging by her effort, it looked as though it weighed about five pounds, maybe less. I eagerly interrogated her about this intriguing rectangular cardboard complex: “Is it heavy? Who is it addressed to? Does it smell like pennies?” I didn’t exactly leave time for her replies, so she dropped it in my lap and I pounced like a five year old attacking his attractively wrapped present on Christmas morning. Her worrisome awareness with my struggle to pry the tape apart with my brute force launched her into a frantic search for the best key on her key ring to cut the Ashley-proof tape with. As soon as she sliced it open, I unfolded the brown cardboard flaps to a glorious sight: three bottles of liquid iron. Yes! Magic Juice!   

There are many theories behind the association between iron deficient anemia and distance runners. To name a few, iron is lost through sweating, red blood cell destruction from footstrike, and depletion that is associated with tissue inflammation. Now, I’ve never been diagnosed with anemia, but whenever I’ve requested a blood test, my ferritin levels have always come back low (the amount of ferritin in one’s blood is directly related to the amount of iron stored in one’s body). It’s said that a normal level is between 10-143 ng/mL, and both times I’ve checked, mine has been 19 and 16. I’ve always wondered what it would feel like to have a ferritin level in the triple digits, so here I am, taking shots of liquid iron twice a day, waiting for some kind of miracle to give me wings.