Facing Unexpected Challenges: My Marathon Journey

Iron Deficiency and Marathon Training: My Unexpected Setback | Zero to 26.2

In this episode of Zero to 26.2, join me as I navigate an unexpected hurdle in my marathon training journey. After feeling unusually exhausted and dealing with a persistent calf injury, I discover that iron deficiency might be the culprit. Follow along as I delve into my lab results, including serum iron, total iron binding capacity, percent iron saturation, and ferritin levels, and discuss the importance of proper iron levels for athletes, especially endurance runners. Learn why iron is crucial for oxygen delivery, recovery, and overall performance. Stay tuned as I talk with my doctor to find solutions and get back on track to reach my marathon goal. Don't forget to share this journey with someone you love and stay updated for more insights and progress!

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Transcript

0:01

Hey friends, welcome back to Zero to 26.2, the series where I am taking you behind the scenes of my journey from Couch or not running all the way to my first marathon. And today I wanted to share something that caught me completely off guard. But first, here's a little video from week two of my training.

Kimberly: 0:25

Okay, friends, I just finished my first week out, my first workout of week two, and it was four minutes running, one minute, walking times five. And as you can hear, I'm still winded. Got a long way to go, but we gotta start somewhere.

0:48

Just watching that video and listening to it, I hear how tired and out of breath I sound. Yes. I just ran four minutes at a time. Wasn't crazy. Definitely wasn't marathon pace. It definitely wasn't eight, nine, even 10 minute miles. And so this is where I'm telling you. Things are shifting and I want to share the journey with you and it's still unfolding, so I don't have the answers, but I wanna share where, where I'm at. So that was week two and week two, I was finally feeling like I could at least stay running, even though it was real slow, but I still felt exhausted afterwards and not just. Like, okay. I haven't run in a while, but completely wiped out. Like I need a nap just to make it through the rest of my day, kind of tired and bone weary, I think is the best way I could describe it. And so it was very interesting to me. And then through the next week, kept running, had different exercises, different um. Basically goals that we had for each workout and through the Runna app, I used a 5K training to start and it had me doing different intervals and different things. And it was Sunday night and I, or Sunday morning, excuse me, and I had to do a, an interval training and it was like 200 meters on. And then 60 or 90 seconds walking. So nothing too crazy, but it did want you to pick up the pace. And so for that 200 meters to go somewhat fast, which I felt like I could do, and in we had to repeat that six times. So it was six of those intervals. On the fourth, I think, or the fifth one. When I hit that interval and I was running, part of it was downhill, and then the other part of it was uphill, and there was something on that uphill where I pulled my left calf and it hurt to walk. I had two more intervals to do, which was then down. I was going back, so it was down that hill and back up again, and I was able to do part of it. I did have to walk some of that interval because I, my calf was hurting so bad I couldn't do it and was able to finish out the next one'cause it was relatively flat and finished out that session and I thought, no worries, no big deal. I can just move my training out a little bit, take a day or two off. My calf will recover, no problem. However, my calf didn't recover, and that was weird. It was day four, day five. I could still feel it when I was walking. Every time I try to just jog a little bit to see how I could do maybe on a run, it just flared back up and it just was not recovering. So I was like, okay, well we'll just take this week off. So that whole week and then into the next week. So now it's been two weeks since I've last run, and it was still hurting up until about three or four days ago. But because I wasn't recovering and because my everything felt bone weary, my husband and I, Darrel, we play cards in the evening. Um, sometimes after dinner we'll just sit there and play cards and just shuffling the cards my forearms felt, heavy and tired and just so weak. And I was thinking, okay, I'm 45. My, I'm having some fluctuations in, in things that maybe, maybe that's what it was. And I was thinking, okay, it's probably my hormones. You know, I'm not able to recover because, you know, maybe those testosterone levels are off or those estradiol levels are off. And that's, that's the issue. So I went into my doctor and we got some labs drawn this past week, and so this is where I wanna share with you what's going on in the journey so we can follow this and see what happens from here. So talk to my doctor, tell him all the things. And of course he is like, oh, we should check your thyroid'cause that's another thing that can make you feel really tired. Uh, and I asked him to check my iron panel because I've never been anemic, but I've always wondered. Um, and the past when I've run, I've always wondered if my ferritin was low. And so we did all that. So we got labs back and. As I started coming in, I can see'em come through my app and CBC, which is your complete blood count, looked normal, not anemic. Everything looks good. So that would tell us if you have some type of iron deficiency anemia or a microcytic anemia or different types of anemias in there. But I wasn't, I looked good. And then comprehensive metabolic panel, which checks kidney function, liver function, all of that also looked good. I'm not diabetic. Fantastic. Thyroid came back totally normal. Awesome. And then we started to get the hormone levels back. And all of those looked good. My estradiol, my progesterone, all of that's in normal ranges. And then my iron panel came in. And so this is, this is where things start to get interesting. So I'm not anemic, but when I look at my iron panel, a couple of things are off. We're gonna talk about four different things that we see in iron panels. So your serum iron, your total iron binding capacity, your percent iron saturation, and then your ferritin levels. So your serum iron is basically the amount of iron floating around in your blood right now, ready to be used. And then, so that was normal, but it was on the low end of normal. Okay. Not, not so sure what to do about that. It's just, it's normal, but low. So the next one is the total iron binding capacity, and this shows how much iron your blood could carry if it had more. And so I think of it as the number of empty seats on the bus waiting for iron to get on. So we have all these seats. The higher the total iron binding capacity is, it means. We can take on more passengers, that bus is empty and you can add more people in. And so that total iron binding capacity for me was high. Still in the normal range, but high. It just tells me that we're we, we can take on much more iron. And then the percent saturation, this is the percentage of seats that are actually filled with iron. So if you're on the iron bus, how, what percentage of seats are actually filled? So normal is 20 to 50%, and mine was down at 11%. So only 11% of my seats are full of iron. And the one thing I haven't gotten back yet is the ferritin level. And ferritin is like the iron storage tank, right? So it tells us how much extra iron we have saved up for later use if we need it. So right now what we know or what I know is that. I am not anemic, but I'm definitely iron deficient. And so this can be a functional iron deficiency. And so now the question is why And now what do we need to do about it? And so I'm still in that, um. That puzzle of trying to figure out what's caused it, what do we need to do? Obviously we will start taking some iron supplements, but it depends, right? It could be an absorption issue. If I'm not absorbing it. I can supplement as much as I want and it may not bump it too much. So we've got some more information to figure out, but it now, it makes a lot of sense of why I feel so exhausted, because I don't have enough iron going in. So let's break down iron a little bit more and why it's important, especially for athletes and for those of you who are athletes and especially endurance runners, even if you're feeling tired, if you have fatigue and you go into your doctor and they check your C, B, C and you're not anemic, that may not be the full story. So an iron panel can be really helpful. So when you think about iron, iron is the oxygen delivery guy, it helps your red blood cells carry oxygen from your lungs to your muscles. So when you're training, your muscles need a lot more oxygen to keep going. So let's think about that. Here I am, I have not enough iron in my blood. I'm not able to bind and carry as much oxygen as I need to, to my muscles, which is why I felt so freaking exhausted because my muscles were literally. Suffocating, right. Wanted to say starving, but they're not starving. But they're starving for oxygen. And so when we have low iron. We have low energy. If you don't have enough iron in your body, you can't move that oxygen. Well, you feel tired, you feel weak. You feel out of breath, right? So listen to that. Go back and listen to me talking. I couldn't breathe and I was like, I. Done. I was walking, I had been walking for a while before I did that video. And here's the other thing. Your legs feel heavy like bricks, even my arms feel it. And that means my heart and my lungs are working even harder, over time, to get the oxygen that I need for the demand that I'm putting on my body. And it's having to work overtime because I don't have the, a way to carry that oxygen efficiently to my body. So another thing to think about that training actually burns through your iron faster exercise, especially running, can use up your iron stores faster through red blood cell turnover and just that extra demand for oxygen for a prolonged period of time. So for those endurance athletes, this can be very important for you to know what your iron's doing and making sure that those stores are good and healthy, and you have that backup. When our iron is low, our recovery gets harder. This is 100% what I experienced in the last two weeks. My muscles were not repairing like they should have. What would normally take me a couple of days to recover and be like, I'm good. Took me two weeks. That was crazy. And so when our iron's low, we are not gonna bounce back as fast as otherwise we would have, so we may have more soreness, more fatigue, and thinking about like, if you're doing okay and you're not necessarily having any injuries, you may just feel like you're plateauing and you just can't get to that next level. And then the other thing is that iron just helps the engine run more smoothly. Think of iron like oil in a car. Without enough iron things are gonna start grinding, overheating, breaking down because I'm not getting oxygen to my muscles and to my tissues where they need to be. Even though I was giving my body fuel, food, water, sleep, I just, I couldn't keep up with the demand I was putting on my body. And so that's where I'm at, and I will keep you posted as we keep going. So no, I have not start running again, because now I need to talk with my doc and figure out why. So that now that's that next question. I really do need to start training, here pretty quickly, so we gotta get on it because I, I did, I signed up for a marathon in September, September 13th. So we gotta go. So we'll see what happens. So there you have it. Thanks for being here with me and being on this journey with me. It has already taught me so much and we're just getting started. I think the biggest thing so far for me that I'm learning in this, but in also a lot of other areas of my life, is listening to my intuition and really paying attention to how I feel. What is my body telling me? What, what is my gut telling me? These things are very important. So thank you again for being on this journey with me. I'll keep you posted as we go. If this resonated with you, please share with someone you love, and until next time, have a good one.