After a long run or endurance race, you’ll probably feel, at minimum, quite tired, a little sore in the legs, a bit hungry and chuffed with yourself for getting it done. It’s unlikely that you’ll feel any concern – or anything at all – for your red blood cells.
But a new study, published in Blood Red Cells & Iron, has shown that there is good reason to think about your red blood cells after running a very long way.
Red blood cells pass through tiny blood vessels in your body to both deliver oxygen to your tissues and carry waste back to your lungs to be exhaled – a job that requires flexibility. However, researchers have found that prolonged running causes your blood cells to become less flexible, which reduces their efficiency and even causes them to break down and age faster.
To arrive at these findings, researchers first took blood samples from 23 runners immediately before and immediately after they competed in two tough long-distance trail races. The first was the Martigny-Combes à Chamonix, which is 40km (25 miles) long. The second was the fabled Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc, or UTMB,one of the most challenging footraces on the planet. Its circular route is roughly 171km (106 miles) long and encompasses about 10,000m of elevation gain – more than climbing Mount Everest.
From these blood samples, the researchers were able to analyse thousands of markers of red blood cell health – and they noticed that participation in these long-distance races was enough to cause significant red blood cell injury. This was caused by physical stress from intense blood flow and molecular damage linked to inflammation and oxidative stress.
Although both races accelerated the ageing and breakdown of red blood cells, the damage – perhaps unsurprisingly – was greater with the UTMB. As such, the researchers have been able to forge a connection between longer races and increased red blood cell loss and injury.
‘At some point between marathon and ultramarathon distances, the damage really starts to take hold,’ said Travis Nemkov, PhD, the study’s lead author and associate professor in the department of biochemistry and molecular genetics at the University of Colorado Anschutz. ‘We’ve observed this damage happening, but we don’t know how long it takes for the body to repair that damage, if that damage has a long-term impact and whether that impact is good or bad.’
The researchers are conscious that this was a limited study involving only a small pool of participants. So, more work needs to be done to understand the exact impact of long-distance running on red blood cells and – as a next step – how we can shape training, recovery and nutrition strategies that maximise performance while minimising cellular damage.
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