I barely survived my 9 miler today, started to feel as bad as I did yesterday and I think I can put the blame on the mugginess and humidity we’ve had the past few days as well as the fact as I donated blood on Thursday afternoon. As a matter of fact, I gave double red blood cells which according to this post on the RunningAhead forums, may be what is really affecting my performance. According to some of the posts by other people, it takes several days to recover and can affect performance, endurance, heart rate, etc. Could this be the smoking gun? I hope so, because my performance took a real hit this weekend, and isn’t helping my training … i’m supposed to donate again in September or October (since I have to wait 16 weeks), we’ll see if we actually do it or not.

EDIT—>UGH … Seems i’ve made a terrible mistake by giving double red blood cells during training … that doesn’t make me feel too good, hopefully it won’t take 8 weeks to recover, I can’t wait that long to do long runs! I’ll never make the marathon!

So today was a little different when I hit the wall in that I started to feel fatigued at around mile 8, so it wasn’t too bad since I was just about done with the run, but if I had decided to go too much further, i’m not sure I would have made it. I was totally overheated, dehydrated and my legs were fatigued real fast even after eating a meal before going out and consuming a ton of water overnight and into the morning .. I also didn’t take any supplements and got a decent nights sleep, so i’ve removed all the factors that caused me to have issues yesterday and it still appeared today .. I’m thinking its the blood donation. I did have one positive and that was I wasn’t totally out of breath like I was yesterday, so that seems to be under control. I also did some research and found out that my 124 pulse rate yesterday after my run (along with my 112 pulse rate today) is normal because my aerobic training zone is approx. 110, so i was in the right zone, my body just isn’t handling it well right now …

I decided to give the blog a new look as well since the old one was getting kind of stale, and I added new pictures of me instead of the old ones from many years back on the headline. I added some more information about my training schedule and status since I got a lot of emails asking for how I train, so its now updated each week (along with the previous weeks status). I’m going to look for some additional plugins to add to the site as well since I now have an extra column ..

I’m hopeful this week will be better than the last as it was cold on Monday and Tuesday (along with some other issues on Tuesday), then Saturdays issue and a crappy run again today .. one can only hope for the best …