21 Weeks...and Stalled

My training for this week was supposed to be:

Monday Rest
Tuesday 3 miles Easy walking
Wednesday Rest
Thursday 4 miles Moderate walking
Friday 30 minutes Easy cross-training
Saturday 5 miles Easy walking
Sunday 4 miles Easy walking

I was so pumped after walking with the boob crew, I was ready to tackle the hills that surround the community I live in. Bring on the training! I've been having such a hard time getting motivated. I've been so tired, too. I was actually starting to wonder if I was depressed, though I didn't FEEL depressed. LOL But when walking up the stairs to my apartment with a bunch of stuff in my arms started to leave me winded, I just had a inkling something was wrong physically. Then when my sister pointed out how pale I was in some photos she took of me a few weeks ago, I started to suspect my iron levels were low.

I've been having some...well...female troubles. So much so that I actually made an emergency appointment with the nurse practitioner at my doctor's office on Tuesday. She ordered some blood tests and made some referrals for a follow up with a gynecologist. The blood tests came back and I'm quite anemic. When I heard that, it was like a light went off. The exhaustion, the lack of motivation...being anemic is like being depressed. Your body tries to do everything that it can to conserve energy and you don't want to do anything. And the body doesn't have enough red blood cells to carry oxygen to your lungs...it's NO WONDER I've been dragging. (Or however the blood cells and oxygen work together!)

One of the KEY lessons of training for the 3 day is learning to listen to your body! And mine has been screaming at me for a couple of months while I haven't paid it any attention. So instead of walking the hills on El Camino Real this holiday weekend, I'm facing some serious R&R. Again. It's not something that can be healed over a three day weekend but hopefully a few (more) days of purposefully doing nothing, some extra iron tablets and some follow up appointments I have over the next few weeks to help solve the female problems, will hopefully start me on my way back to getting into training shape. It's frustrating to finally WANT to train and not be able to. But at least I have the motivation to feel better as to be able to train! The bed rest, so to speak, has a purpose at least. And I am starting to feel like myself again, though it's kind of ironic that after two months of dragging, I still have to "lay low!" So in the continued downtime, maybe I'll start working on that 3 day scrapbook I've been talking about for two years!