[Scratch]

When I go running, I carry a tube or two of glucose tabs, along with a packet or 2 of GU. So I'll always have at least 68 grams of carbs with me and as much as 136 grams of carbs.

I'd guess based upon your age and recent diagnosis, you're a type 1.5 and it's good that you've taken control quickly, that should help extend the prolonged honeymoon period you can have, milk that pancreas for all the time you can get out of it.

I ran a really short, really slow recovery jog today. I knew I was going to run slow anyhow today, but it was kept really slow because it's a recovery week anyway and I've also spotted that my resting heart rate is a few beats above where it's been, a definite sign that I'm a bit fatigued. I also had a stretch of 5 straight nights of less than ideal sleep.

At least I slept decent last night. Good. I'm not sure what I"m going to do with Saturday's run yet, and I'm also considering taking Sunday off from running, so I can get two consecutive days of rest for my legs. I'm basing that off the feeling I've been getting from the last few runs along with the heart rate.

[Scratch]

Incredibly hot and humid here today. It resulted in one of the worst feeling runs I've ever had, and I ended up taking a number of walk breaks to cover the 6.2 miles. I'm definitely taking Sunday and Monday off from running.

[Dan Gato]

Wow Scratch, you already ran 52 miles in August !
you deserve the rest.

you beat me by 51 miles.

[Scratch]

A 5 mile tempo run this morning, started off with 1 easy mile to warmup, then ran some harder the next 3 miles, and then cooled down with a mile jog. Done at a high school track while the moon slowly disappeared behind the earth's shadow.

I still suspect I've got a bit of cumulative fatigue right now, not only do I run but I also do strength training for my upper body and I may be doing a bit more than my body can recover from all at once. Try to make my next 5 runs all very easy before I run a 10K race on the 8th of September.

[Scratch]

3.25 slow miles on the track this morning. I just wanted to run them nice and slow, put another small deposit into the aerobic tank and have my legs ready for the long run on Saturday.

[Scratch]

8.3 mile run today, my longest yet. It was a bit on the slow side because I still have too much cumulative fatigue in my system. Besides the running, I also do a lot of bodyweight training and I believe that all the activity has been a bit too much for my body to make full recovery. So I need to keep my runs between now and Saturday next weekend light and easy, and I hope that'll get me well rested for the 10K race that day.

[Scratch]

2.75 mile recovery jog this morning.

And today, today I finally officialized it or whatever. I paid my registration to run the half-marathon in Philadelphia on November 18th, it seemed like a good idea seeing that entry fees were going up 15 dollars in a couple of days.

Barring unforeseen misfortune or injury, I'll be running in Philadelphia in about 2.5 months.

[Scratch]

Just a short jog this morning, 2.5 miles at the track. Rinse and repeat on Thursday and hopefully my legs will be full of spring for the 10K race on Saturday.

[Scratch]

Did about the same as Tuesday, ran it a little bit easier. A little bit of humidity has come back into the area and the forecast has it still in here on Saturday unfortunately. The warmer and more humid it gets, the harder it is to run.

[Scratch]

Had a lot of things go badly at my first 10K race yesterday.

First problem came from me having a hypo overnight and then a liver rebound. My blood sugar upon waking up was ~250 mg/dl, this after I had checked my glucose at 1:30 and it was ~90 mg/dl, when I ate a glucose tablet as that usually keeps me pretty steady or I rise slightly. But for unknown reasons, my liver didn't wake up and I must have hypoed maybe around 4:30 to 5 AM.

I was able to get my blood sugar corrected to about~140 mg/dl near race time. But my body just didn't feel all that great, you know what I mean if when you've had a hypo and a big adrenaline release earlier, afterwards you feel a bit washed out.

And it was hot. It was humid. Really bad for September.

The course was tough. Quite hilly. I got through the first loop of it okay enough if I had been running a 5K, but when I hit that second go at the uphill at the start of the loop for the second lap, it crushed me. I began walking near the top and would do alternating walking and running for the second half of the race.

The end result was a performance much slower than I would have liked even in more conservative projections of 66 minutes if I was slow out there. It took me 73.5 minutes to finish the whole 10K.

I was pretty upset about all of it, about being diabetic, about the weather, about my mistake of not scaling back and starting off easy and slow so I might finish strong over the way it went out there.

I'm processing all of it better as time has passed. Some bad luck, some bad circumstances, a few errors in judgment on my part made for a really tough race. Even so, even at the worst when it would have been easy to say screw it, give up and not finish, I finished it. That's worth something there.

[jpnairn]

Finishing is worth a lot.
You've got the right attitude, Scratch. Count it as a learning experience, good and bad. Maybe you made some mistakes in pacing, but you stuck it out to finish. Remember you were able to pull through it when it got tough.
I know exactly how it feels to be anticipating a race for weeks or months, only to wake up with blood sugar problems on the crucial day. And very few people at the starting line would have any understanding of what you've been through.
As you said, som bad luck, not just the hypo and rebound, but having diabetes in the first place. But we persevere, we live our lives, we just do it anyway.
I've been a runner and a type 1 diabetic for over 30 years, so I know pretty much how it is. You're doing a great thing telling your story here.
Best wishes and please keep it up with logging it here.
Thanks.

[Scratch]

Originally Posted by jpnairn

Finishing is worth a lot.
You've got the right attitude, Scratch. Count it as a learning experience, good and bad. Maybe you made some mistakes in pacing, but you stuck it out to finish. Remember you were able to pull through it when it got tough.
I know exactly how it feels to be anticipating a race for weeks or months, only to wake up with blood sugar problems on the crucial day. And very few people at the starting line would have any understanding of what you've been through.
As you said, som bad luck, not just the hypo and rebound, but having diabetes in the first place. But we persevere, we live our lives, we just do it anyway.
I've been a runner and a type 1 diabetic for over 30 years, so I know pretty much how it is. You're doing a great thing telling your story here.
Best wishes and please keep it up with logging it here.
Thanks.

Thank you, I appreciate that.

----

To recover physically, mentally and emotionally after the disappointment and poor performance in the 10K on Saturday, I did something I hadn’t done for almost 5 months — took 3 days off in a row from running. It felt a bit odd on Tuesday morning to get up and not go running. This morning I felt ready again and drove to the track. 3 easy miles round and round. No worries no pressure, just run at a comfortable feeling pace and all by myself in the darkness. It was relaxing. Just run.

My legs seemed to feel lighter than they had for a long time on a run, so maybe the extra rest was important. I wasn’t being lazy, I was just taking needed time to balance the other side of the exercise equation — recovery.

There’s still a lot ahead of me for the next two months. It’s impossible to say exactly what will happen and maybe I’ll have to be careful about the overall number of miles I try to get in, with primary importance put on extending the number on the miles of the long run each weekend where the long runs go longer. The schedule I originally came up with tried to have the long run maxing out around 40% of the weekly miles, but if that goes up to 50% then that’ll be what’s done. I’m still very new to running and I’ve made good progress since April when I had no base really and have gotten to 19.4 miles in a week.

I still hope to hit a 30 mile week at the end of October and start of November, but I won’t be upset if it ends up being down around 25 miles. Just so long as I get the long runs built up enough so I can feel confident come November 18th that I can run all or most of the 13.1 in Philadelphia. And no matter how that exactly gets done, that’ll be far more than I’ve ever done before, it’s a goal worth pursuing. Even this morning, even those piddling 3 miles of easy pace, were more than I’ve ever done before. That’s worth something. Those were miles I couldn’t have done back in April. On May 5th, I think, it took me 37.5 minutes of pushing myself to the utmost to go 3.1 miles. I could have done that laughing this morning.

I’m getting there, I’m getting there. I’m getting there with a bit of extra burden that many don’t have to worry about, they don’t have to worry about what happens to the blood sugars as they sleep, don’t have to calculate out boluses and corrections, don’t have to stab themselves in the fingers to crudely monitor what should be an automated regulatory system. The week I went 19.4 miles running involved me bleeding my fingers nearly 70 times. 8 of those times were before and after those 19.4 miles.

I don’t know if that really means anything to anyone else, but it’s got meaning to me.

[Scratch]

So I've been real lazy this week or it's been me taking seriously the idea that there are two sides of the equation that need to be balanced in an exercise program.

On the one side of the equation is the exercise, stressing your body. During that stress, the body breaks down and that's where the other side of the equation comes into everything. You need rest, the body needs to rebuild after the stress of exercise breaks things up, breaks things apart, breaks you down. The body responds to that stimulus by trying to rebuild things, and usually rebuilds them to be stronger and more efficient than before.

But if you don't rest enough, you can see what the problem might be.

Tomorrow, I've got a 5K race. I had hoped that by doing a 10K last weekend and the 5K this weekend, it was going to give me two useful data points that I might extrapolate a projection of how fast I could run a half-marathon at this time, assuming I already had sufficient mileage build up. But the 10K race went all kinds of wrong and I know it wasn't anywhere close to what my best should have been.

Hopefully tomorrow morning now that my legs will be a lot more rested and the weather much more favorable, I'll get a decent measure of my fitness and that I've had some further improvement since my last 5K on the 21st of July. The race is being held about 1.5 miles from where I live, so my plan dependent some upon weather is to jog to the race to serve as warmup, my legs might need that after taking almost the whole weeks off except for the 3 miles Wednesday morning.

Then I'll try to run a good race. I think I should be able to come in under 29 minutes, but it's hard to say and the misery of last week's experience is still haunting my thoughts some.

[Scratch]

The 5K race went much better than last weekend. When I got up, I checked weather underground to see the radar picture and it showed that one last line of showers was coming, looked like they were coming fast enough to blow through before 8 AM. That's what they did all right, so when I left the door today there was a good cool breeze and everything was drying out.

Using a checklist earlier, in my pockets I carried extra carbs, a house key, entry fee money, the ultramini glucometer, a tube with 6 test strips and a lancet device. In my hand I carried the Novolog flexpen since it doesn't fit in the pockets well and I didn't want it to be jostled out and lost along the way.

I reached the registration area about 8:15 and got signed in and paid up. I was glad that I had jogged there, when I first started out this morning my legs felt a bit stiff after so much rest, the jog helped to shake them out and open things up. I got to check out the map of the course -- an out and back, and knowing the area like I do, it was going to be a mostly downhill first mile, level 2nd mile, then uphill for the end. So I tried to set myself to think about using the downhill for the first stretch but don't go too hard because that uphill finish was going to be painful.

I was quite surprised when I hit the 1 mile marker in 8:37, and I have reason to suspect it wasn't fully 1 mile by then. Oh well, I was pretty happy, I hadn't blown my legs out and was running comfortably hard unlike a person who was with me at that time and very audibly breathing behind me.

So I just tried to keep my pace going and hit the turnaroud the turnaround barrel at 14:32. So I was close to going after a time under 29 minutes although I knew it would be tough with the uphill at the last.

The hill had seemed so insignificant on the way out, but it loomed a bit bigger as I took in the last bit of flat before the final ascent. I just tried to put all my will into keeping the legs moving. It was hurting pretty bad as I turned back onto the school campus where the race had begun and I tried my hardest to get enough out of the legs to beat 29.

Couldn't do it. 29:11. But overall I'm happy. Much better effort and race management, didn't feel like I had left too much in the tank.

Blood sugar was 91 mg/dl at 8:30, I put in 1 unit of Novolog, and testing immediately after finishing I had gone to 146 mg/dl. I was happy with that.

I wasn't so happy when I jogged/walked home and the test here showed 200 mg/dl. I guess my liver hadn't figured out to slow down yet.

[Scratch]

About 5.6 miles this morning in wonderfully cool temps. 3.8 miles of the run were approximately at tempo pace. It was a good feeling run, one of the best feeling runs I've had in some time.

2 months away now from November 18th. It's getting closer and closer. I've made good progress so far. And if things go really well, right about this time I should be about a half-mile to one mile away from the finish line.