Iron Woman

No, I have no intention in doing an iron man anytime soon, but I am super excited about my results from taking iron supplements! For the past couple of years I feel like I've been getting more and more out of shape despite still maintaining an ongoing workout schedule. By the end of last year I ran a couple of 5ks in which I could barely make it under a 10 minute mile pace. Considering I used to be able to run a half marathon with a much faster pace than that, I was pretty dissapointed. No matter how hard I tried it seemed like my body was always completely fatigued. A couple of times I googled causes of chronic fatigue and one thing that kept coming up was an iron deficiency. I convinced myself that surely this wasn't the problem and I must just not be working hard enough. Over Christmas in Georgia my father-in-law told me that eating ice (which I had started to do pretty often) was a sign of an iron deficiency. This was the second time iron came up for me and made me start thinking! As soon as we got back from Christmas vacation I went out and got some iron supplements. I figured it couldn't hurt. We had also just moved to the Queen Anne neighborhood in Seattle which is pretty hilly, so I started hitting up those hills on my runs. The first few weeks it was killer! After about a month things started getting a little easier for me, so I signed up for another 5k. I figured maybe at this point I could make it under 9 minute miles since I was feeling a lot more energized than a few months before that. To my surprise I ran the fasted 5k race I had done to date! I ran it in 23:23 with an average mile pace of 7:31. I finally felt like I was getting back into shape! It's crazy that in less than 2 months I could drop over 7 minutes off of my 5k time!

Hoping this wasn't just a fluke I kept up with my running on the Queen Anne hills and signed up for another race that I did this past weekend. This time it was a 12k. I've done this race once before a couple of years ago. The path is right along lake washington and around the halfway point the Seahawks drumline is playing to pump you up and there were even Seahawks players handing out water to us along the course! Since it was over twice the distance of the 5k race and much more hilly, I was hoping to at least run it with around an 8 min mile pace and finish it under an hour. It turned out to be perfect conditions for the run and I ended up finishing it in 57:24 with an average mile pace of 7:42. Out of 754 females, I finished 10th! That made me feel much better about my training! I think I'm actually finally getting back into shape, and back to the moral of this story, I'm pretty sure it is all due to the iron supplements. Little did I know that I had an iron deficiency, and I certainly didn't think it had effected me that much! 

When I told my iron supplement results to my super smart scientist of a sister, she told me she noticed that looking at my '23 and me' DNA results it showed that I had a higher chance for iron deficiency. Apparently I'm not very good at reading DNA results since I didn't notice that! Good thing I have a super smart family :) Either way, I am thrilled to have discovered this and figured out a solution to it so I can stop beating myself up about my severe fatigue! Hopefully I'll keep getting better!