Training Log Archive: iansmith

I have had a rough week physically. I started feeling unusually fatigued and exhausted last Wednesday. I took a day off from work to try to sleep and recover, but my fatigue appeared independent of sleep. I was so lethargic this weekend that I booked a doctor's appointment - fearing lyme or mono. I went to a Canadian doctor for the first time, which was pretty smooth, uneventful, and efficient. The doctor's greatest concern was that the blood tests would be inconclusive.

Anyway, the tests came back yesterday, two days after they were administered. The mono test was negative; the only anomaly was quite low ferritin - a protein which is used to store iron for availability later. Typically low ferritin means low iron; my ferritin level was 17 ng/mL, whereas the blood test had a healthy range of 24-453 ug/mL. I don't know where the healthy reference comes from. Curiously, hemoglobin and red blood cell counts were normal - i.e. I am not anemic. My doctor speculates that I am dealing with low iron, and I will discuss in a followup on Tuesday. I haven't had any overt nutritional or iron problems in my past (though a healthy stream of burritos no doubt contributed), but this was brutal. Getting out of bed was a battle, and I felt like death. I have been commuting by bike - 7-8 km ride, 20-30 minutes depending on traffic and whether I'm going downhill (to work) or uphill.

C • Theory 2

Returning home took longer, but I think I will just record my typical commute routes as 8 km/20 minutes of effort.

Squash with Laleh and Mickael from the Hoffman lab. Mickael talks a lot of trash about basically anything, but it turned out to be justified. In my weakened state, my technique was too poor to make much headway, and I lost 11-2, 11-1 in two games. Dismal.

To and from work.

Commute. I went to the Doctor at the U of T medical clinic and a blood lab on Bay St. Felt awful, with no energy, no stamina, no reserves of any kind. Small efforts commuting seemed to bring me to the point of complete exhaustion almost instantaneously, as though my HR spiked from 60 to 190.