Just a small personal victory, and an excellent learning experience.

I’m usually a decent runner for someone who doesn’t put extreme efforts into training. I’ve often been in the first 1/3 to 1/10 of finishers and have sometimes been at the top of my age group.

Well, I’ve been struggling really badly with my pace since I had COVID a year ago, and I had been really careful about getting back into running (took 10 weeks off) as I was so worried it was long-COVID.

My pace went up about 2-3 minutes a mile, and I ended up feeling like I was shoved down. This summer I had to stop mid-run, and that never happened before in all the years I’ve been running. That’s when I reached out to my doctor.

I got my bloodwork done in the fall, and it turned out I had both anemia and super low vitamin D (both D3 and D2—even though take a combo calcium/D tablet). In retrospect, it would have been wise to have my bloodwork done earlier for nutritional deficiencies as COVID screwed up my periods. I kept getting them every two weeks for a couple months (totally a guarantee to end up with anemia), but I never thought of it.

So I started taking supplements and noticed within a couple of weeks that my heart rate started going back down, and my runs felt much easier.

When I ran an 8K last weekend I didn’t PR, but I’m so happy with the time. I did much better than I thought I would. My pace actually beat my 5K pace from late August! I’m hoping to speed up over the winter more as I work on my nutrition and upping my muscle-to-fat ratio.