I had signed up over a month or so ago to donate blood this Friday at my work. I was going to do a double red donation. But then I started training for a marathon in December, which is going to be hard enough. Then I signed up to run a half marathon this Sunday having forgotten temporarily about the blood donation. When I remembered, I did a search for information about double red donations and running. I vaguely remember then saying after my last double red donation that it had less of an impact than a regular donation, because they put most of the stuff back in. But in my reading, I found that people were complaining about about even being able to complete short runs following a double red donation, and that even 5 weeks later they still were running markedly slower. Ouch! I am going to be having a hard enough time with running a half marathon. It will be the longest distance I have run to date. My legs are still hurting from the 11 mile run yesterday. I can’t imagine how I would fare after having a big chunk of my red blood cells removed from my body. Kind of reverse blood doping. And I have a karate tournament coming up next month as well. So I scratched my name off the blood donation list. Maybe I will sign up again in January, or late December after I complete the marathon.

Posted by Rob in Running on September 11th, 2006 |