A red blood cell will travel 27 feet (8.2 meters) in one minute. After a red blood cell leaves the left side of the heart, it will travel through arteries, capillaries, and veins and then back to the rightide of the heart. The cell travels the fastest in the arteries because of the greater pressure. It slows down to almost a standstill as it passes through the microscope capillaries, then sppeds up once it gets into the large veins.

The red blood cell can take many paths since there are 60,000 miles (96,540 kilometers) of blood vessels in the body. That is a distance equal to twice around the world at the equator.