Blood donation on-site at work last Thurs, so I signed up. The nice lady says that I’ve got nice veins and since I’m O+, she asked if I’d be interested in donating ‘double reds’. Since I generally bounce back from whole blood donation pretty quickly, I ask a few questions about the procedure - sounds o.k., so I say ‘sure, let’s do it’. “Double Reds” entails collection of a pint of whole blood, centrifugal separation of the red blood cells, and return of the separated plasma to the donor along with a little saline to maintain blood volume - repeat 1X, hence the ‘double’ part. In my mind, I’m picturing all these fresh new RBC’s that will be shuttling oxygen around - and double! - that’s gotta be twice as good, right?! I asked if I’d be able to run that evening since it’s a key interval workout - they say ‘no problem, just drink lots of fluids during the day’. The run was a total abortion - 3X 4K loops @ hard tempo effort - I bailed after 2 due to extreme misery, and little training benefit being realized. Yesterday’s ride/T-run went o.k., but today’s long run sucked hard. Totally ran out of gas @ 13 mi, and cut the 18 miler down to 16.5.
Checked the Red Cross website today to find out more about the recovery time from donating RBC’s - 4-6 weeks…X2 for double donation. Super. 8-12 weeks. IMWI is in 6. I’m now voluntarily anemic at precisely the time when my training volume is supposed to max out.
I’m trying to convince myself that this whole thing is serendipitously genius - artificially simulated altitude training 24-7. I figure if I can keep training, it’ll force the ol’ marrow to crank out those shiny new RBC’s at an accelerated rate, all the while the body will suck it up and get used to training on less O2. For better or worse, the blood un-doping experiment has begun.
No need to let me know that I’m an idiot - please let me have my illusion for a while, or hook a brother up with some EPO.
Listen…your body is simply telling you to ease off time and tempo for a couple days. I am an avid blood donor, double reds and have done it everytime my wait is up for the last 12 months or so. Just relax for a couple days…do some very light spins on the trainer, maybe some walking or very short 4-6 mile slow runs and light swims…I do this for about 3 days after donating double reds. I also eat a lot of meet to get my iron back up and take in tons of water, and I haven’t had any major set backs. I completed IMLP in a mediocre time of 12:15 and donated double reds 3 weeks prior…just my .02
Thanks for the advice! Never done ‘double reds’ before, and after reading about the long recovery and feeling crappy during workouts, I was fairly certain that I’d dropped the ball. Plan is a couple of EZ days, lots of fluids and back to work - time’s a-wastin’. As a universal donor, I’ll do it every chance I get - might consider my race schedule a little closer in the future, though. It’d be pretty cool if I stupidly stumbled onto a training breakthough, though.
Not ideal, but you will be fine. Good work for giving blood for sure though. However, O+ is not considered the universal donor. O- is, but O+ is the biggest group in the U.S.
An alternative to whole blood donation you may want to consider is platelet donation via apheresis. Platelets are in particularly high demand for certain types of therapies (e.g. Leukemia patients), and dedicated platelet donations yield many times the amount of platelets than you get from a standard donation. There are also benefits in reducing the number of donors’ platelets that are combined for a single patient transfusion.
They hook the donor up to a machine which draws blood, separates it cetrifugally, and then returns everything except the platelets. This cycle is repeated 6 - 8 times depending on body weight; thus, the whole procedure is more time consuming (~ 2 hours). However, you only lose incidental amounts of red blood cells, and hence there is negligible performance impact. (One sign of this is that you are allowed to donate platelets much more frequently, up to every 2 weeks. I try to average once per month.)
I doubt this is an option at a typical blood drive in the workplace; I go to the blood bank at my local hospital, but in my case this is nearby & convenient. They have a library of videos & DVDs to watch, and they also give me free lunch while I donate (granted, hospital cafeteria food).
To your particular situation, eat lots of rare steak and don’t feel guilty!