No more excuses?

Well, it's taken around 4 months to track down and fix, but it looks like my serum ferritin problem is over.

Um... that's the good news. The bad news is - does this mean I've got no more excuses?

A quick recap in the best tradition of the soaps: Simon ends the season burnt out and injured, has a month off running to allow the adductor tear to heal up, starts training,goes down with a virus, recovers magnificently, starts training, gets slower and slower and more and more tired. Reduced to training only every other day, he gets a blood test and discovers he has basement-level iron stores, so hasn't got enough oxygen in his blood. This is quite worrying, seeing that he is living and training at altitude. Gets an iron shot in the butt and embarks on two months of iron supplementation. Retests: serum ferritin goes DOWN. Has intravenous iron. Feels worse. Guts shot to hell. Can't breathe when at speed, but lung function tests super-normal. Starts to feel OK except at speed.. the first "good" sign for months. Suspects iron problem is fixed but has lost so much training he is now just not fit enough...

and that turns out to be true... new blood tests show my serum ferritin is finallu UP -- from 35 in January to...drum roll...118!

Now that's more like it. IV iron works. So despite the digestive upsets, it was worth it.

ALL the blood work is now looking fantastic. You can imagine how pleased I am!

So now... the plan is we press "restart". I'm putting all races on hold and going into a 5-6-week week of steady running to build my leg strength and aerobic capacity back up. The quality work I've been attempting to do with small amounts of oxygen-carrying capacity in my system has contributed to tearing me down. So I'm "banned" from out and out speed work except for one session of 200m repeats a week, just to keep the zip in my legs and my eye on the prize.

It's a pain. But not the complete disaster I was preparing for -- to write off the whole season. Instead I'm abandoning the Bolder Boulder 10k, the Senior Olympics and the World championships, but when I do race again later this year I expect to set the road alight :)

"They"'ve been calling this saga a roller-coaster... I think I swooped down to the water splash -- and got stuck there. But now the gears are clanking and the chains are rattling as I start the haul back up to where I can fly again.