Sweating blood... Not quite.

Friday evening was the annual Lake Forest Elementary Spring Carnival. Since young son attends the school and dear wife works there, we were 'all in' for the evening. It was fun. Being a neighborhood school there are lots of friends out and about to visit with. The kids go nuts busing confetti eggs on everyone and firing off untold cans of silly string.

While Lee went off to work her shift at one of the attractions, I did something that I don't do often enough..... Donate blood. To show you I am serious about saying I don't do it enough, this was the first time I had given blood since I started running. Sot it had been at least 18 months. The first thing I noticed was that the lady doing the paperwork gave me quite a compliment. She looked at me as she took my blood pressure and said, "You must work out a lot." Naturally I thought my athletic build was the giveaway, but my ego was quickly shot when she said "I hope you do anyway, otherwise you are in trouble. Your pulse is 50." Alas, it was my pulse and not my pecs that gave me way... :)

The rest of the bloodletting was routine and I didn't think anything about it. Then about 12 hours later I went for a run.... Hmm, I might as well have been running for the first time. At least that is how it felt for the first 3 miles. I felt a little better during mile 4 and 5, but no where near how I should have felt. My pace was so bad, I expected to get passed by a snail at any time. I didn't get out today, but I hope that by Monday I am back to close to normal. I know it takes 6-8 weeks to get all your red blood cells back, but from what I read online I should be back to normal running fairly quickly. Otherwise, it looks like a SLOW run in the GHS 5K is coming up this Friday....

All that said, I won't let it deter me from giving blood. I will definitely look at WHEN I give blood though!