runningwithinsulin

“The Marathon Will Humble You.”

-Bill Rodgers

I’ve written about this before, but I believe that in many ways diabetes and distance running are similar. Both take dedication and commitment to manage well. Both can be quite difficult. And both can return unexpectedly poor results despite our best preparation.

The race weekend really started for me on Friday evening. The Girlfriend and I went into the city to meet up with a bunch of folks in town for the race and the Insulindependence educational symposium which was to take place the next day. Dinner was… okay. Honestly it was a restaurant I’ve never been to before, and will almost certainly never go back to, but seeing everyone was fantastic and made it all worthwhile. Saturday morning after an easy 3 mile jog to keep loose I headed over to the previously mentioned symposium and cannot speak highly enough about it. This year the speakers were:

Scott Johnson – Well known diabetes blogger and advocate, Scott was this year’s Insulindependence Athletic Achievement Award winner. Scott’s “everyman” approach to living with diabetes was fun and motivational.

Gary Scheiner – Author of Think Like A Pancreas and current Diabetes Educator of the Year, Gary gave a great presentation on managing glucose during exercise. It’s easy to see why he has such a great reputation!

Anna Floreen – Anna gave a fascinating presentation about her experiences with the Bionic Pancreas. I was fortunate enough to sit through a presentation by Dr. Steven Russell on this project back in August, but to hear the patient’s perspective took it to a whole new level of excitement. I know we’re still a long way from this being a reality in the marketplace, but I can’t help getting a little bit excited!

Dr. Matt Corcoran – Dr. Corcoran is the founder of Diabetes Training Camp, and as such has a remarkable amount of experience looking at the physiology of endurance athletics and diabetes. I learned from every presentation, but this one had me re-thinking how I do some of the things I do.

Suffice it to say it was well worth attending. I even got to finally meet some folks I’d previously only known online (I’m looking at you, Kunik!).

Anyway before I knew it I was sitting at the kitchen table eating breakfast at 3AM Sunday morning so my bolus insulin would have time to clear before the start. An hour later I woke up The Girlfriend. An hour after than we were in the city. An hour after that we had met up with several other IN runners. An hour after that we were on our way!

The first few miles were uneventful. Mostly spent trying to move past people that had clearly started in the wrong corral. As is the norm for me, I wasn’t wearing a watch, but I knew the course would have a clock at each mile marker. Personally I try not to know my exact time when I race, as I think it can be limiting. If you’re running along and feeling good, then you find you’re running faster than you thought you were, the natural tendency is to panic and slow down even though up until that point you felt fine. In other words if you think you can’t, you can’t. So to avoid this as best I could I tried to not pay attention to what the clock read when I crossed the starting mat. If I’m honest, I still had a fairly good idea of my pace, but even still when I caught up to a pace group around mile 9 I was pleasantly surprised. The group was for a time I thought I could realistically finish within, so at that point I was content to slow it down a touch and stay with them. As it happened, a woman running in the group noticed my singlet and struck up a conversation. Turns out her husband is a type 1 iron distance athlete and coach! We chatted for a bit until some other runners drifted between us, but it was reassuring that I could still hold a conversation while we went through halfway. One thing I did notice, but didn’t think much of, was a bit of twitching in my calves.

By mile 14 the twitching had become more pronounced.

By 16 the twitching had become full-on cramps.

Toe-curling, leg-crippling cramps.

By 17 a volunteer asked me if I wanted medical attention.

By 18 I found myself sitting against a guardrail questioning everything. In retrospect that moment may well have been the lowest moment I’ve ever had in a race. All those lonely miles. All that time spent away from my friends, my family, The Girlfriend, and even my dog. They had all led up to me sitting on the side of the road unable to run more than a few steps without my lower legs seizing completely. And as I sat there, head hanging between my knees, I did something I’ve never done before – I gave up.

But then something remarkable happened: I began to walk.

At first I told myself I was just walking to a place I could more easily be picked up, but as I continued I began to think. I thought of my friends Vic and Lindsay who, at that very moment, were in the middle of Ironman Arizona. I thought of my friend Danielle who was told a few years ago that she may never walk again thanks to her diabetes and was at that very moment in the midst of another half marathon. I thought of all the love and support I’ve been given by the diabetes community, even people I’ve never met face to face. And I began to run.

Then my calves cramped again.

But I continued to walk. Finally I was able to jog a little. Then jog a little more. By mile 22 I was jogging more than I was walking, and by 23 I didn’t have to walk at all provided I kept the pace very slow.

I crossed the finish line over 45 minutes after I expected to, but I crossed the finish line. Suddenly I was filled with conflicting emotions – relief, joy, pain, and a bit of soul crushing disappointment. But then I heard my name, and The Girlfriend was there, on the other side of the barrier, smiling and looking at me with such pride that I couldn’t help but feel like I had just accomplished something amazing. Then, after I made my way out of the finishing chute, she gave me a hug that made it all worth it.

Then I got sick in a bush next to the sidewalk. Hey, it’s not all puppy dogs and rainbows. 🙂

I’m sure many of you have found yourself asking recently, “Huh, I wonder where that runningwithinsulin guy has been?”

Wonder no longer!

The truth is that I’ve been away in the wilderness of Montana. As some of you may know, I have been a volunteer “captain” for Insulindependence for a while. Mostly this has involved leading monthly local events, representing the organization locally, and just spreading the diabetes love. The culmination of the program, though, was mentoring a young diabetic “junior captain” at a week long  trip canoeing the Missouri River in the previously mentioned Montana wilderness. (Note: I feel like saying “Montana wilderness” is redundant. Kind of like Street Road.)

Wilderness!!!

It’s not hyperbole for me to call this a life-changing trip. Spending time completely off the grid learning so much about myself and my own diabetes while watching young people do the same was humbling and inspiring. Oh and I also got to spend more quality time with The Diabetic Camper, so there’s that.

To give some details on the trip itself, the amazing guides from Wilderness Inquiry took care of the details like boats and food, and we spent six days on the river paddling just short of 50 miles. We camped in many of the same places the famed Lewis and Clark expedition camped at, and even read some of the journal entries Captain Lewis wrote from those very spots over two hundred years before. On one of the days we laid over without paddling and took a hike to the Hole In The Wall:

There’s a hole in that there wall!

During the hike we reached a point where the trail went a little, shall we say, vertical. While people were a little nervous, everyone came together and encouraged one another to make it up the small climb. In retrospect, this was the defining moment of the week. The support everyone gave each other and the looks of accomplishment afterward left me nearly moved to tears. Just awesome.

On a more directly diabetes related note, paddling seems to make me insanely insulin sensitive. There were a couple of days there during which I was using less than half my typical total daily dose and eating decidedly NOT low carb. It almost became a running joke between myself and the CDE that was with us that at any given time I was shoveling carbs into my mouth while my basal rate was 70% down. I found this especially interesting given the fact that in daily life I am far from a sedentary person. Maybe I should become a river guide! (note: I am not becoming a river guide)

So that was the trip. Well, actually that was only part of the trip…

No, I don’t mean running with no clothes. I mean really, who thinks that’s a good idea? All your floppy bits… flopping. It just sounds uncomfortable (though a brief nekkid jog around the house never hurt anyone). And as a diabetic on a pump the logistics would be a nightmare.

So what is naked running? According to The Naked Runners, it’s all about ditching the distractions. Lace up your shoes, head out the door, and run. Leave the iPod, heart rate monitor, GPS, even your watch. Stop worrying about splits and pace. Stop counting miles. Run until you don’t feel like running anymore. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m as big a fan of technology as the next guy and more often than not I have my Garmin strapped to my wrist, but sometimes I think letting go of all that can help make us better runners. It brings us back to the primal nature of the activity and in some ways reminds us that we’re really alive.

Now want to take it to the next level? Race naked. I truly believe that too often the limiting factor in our racing is not our fitness, but our perception of what we think we are capable of. More than once I’ve run much faster in races than I though I could given my training at the time simply because I didn’t know how fast I was going. If I had I almost certainly would have slowed down!

So there you go: running naked. Try it. You just might like it.

c’est ne pas une trap?

As we embark upon any challenge there are pitfalls and traps that we should attempt to avoid if we wish to attain success. Marathon training, and running in general, have more than their fair share; probably far more than I could comfortably list on a blog post. That having been said, here are a couple that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately and wanted to touch on.

Trap the First: Racing Your Training.

When training for a race (as opposed to just running to keep fit) every run should have a purpose. Spend enough time around runners and you’ll almost certainly hear the phrase “periodization” tossed around. In simple terms, periodization is the systematic planning of training periods, with different specific training added each period and the aim of “peaking” at the right time. As it applies to endurance athletics (again, speaking in general terms) the periods tend to be:

• Base – This is where we build our aerobic engine. There are lots of differing opinions on this phase (from Lydiard‘s 100 miles per week to Maffetone’s somewhat more controversial thoughts) but what’s clear is that the base phase is what gives us the endurance and aerobic conditioning to prepare our bodies for the more demanding training to come.
• Build – We’ve built the engine, now we have to tune it. Here is where workouts such as hill repeats or speed intervals are added. For the marathon traditionally one or more long runs per week are added.
• Taper – A planned reduction in training volume over a short period of time leading up to the race allowing maximum recovery so you get to the start line fresh and sharp.
• Race – The thing you’ve worked toward. Self explanatory!

(Unless you’re my friend Jeff who likes the “base… taper” school of thought, but that’s a post for another day)

If you’d like more information on this sort of thing there are a TON of great books out there. Perhaps soon I’ll put together a list of my favorites. Anyway the point here is that by understanding which phase we are in and what that phase is intended to accomplish we can break it down to an individual workout level, and that’s where we learn to avoid the trap of Racing Your Training. For example I am currently smack dab in the middle of my base training. The intention of base training is (in my opinion) not to make you faster, but to build the leg strength and aerobic endurance to prepare your body for the more demanding training to come while also developing your body’s fat burning process. Running fast, relative to your current fitness, accomplishes none of these goals! In fact, it’s probably putting you on the path to injury. Now is when you can slow down and just enjoy your runs. Find someone to run with that you can talk to. If your speech gets choppy, you’re going too fast! Now please don’t take this to mean you should always run slowly, after all during the build phase there should be one or more quality speed-focused workouts every week, but even then we need to slow WAY down on our recovery days. Whenever I read about a western elite runner spending time in Kenya or Ethiopia they consistently remark that the key difference between how the African runners train and the Western runners is that the Africans go faster on their hard days, and much slower on their easy days.

Trap the Second: Becoming a Slave to the Numbers.

This has always been a tough one for me. I love me some stats. What I have often found myself doing in the past would be going out for a run that was a planned distance and when I didn’t really feel it forcing myself to complete the distance even at the expense of future runs. Or, even if I DID somehow manage to bag a run early and save myself a little I’d find myself looking at the planned weekly mileage and trying to either squeeze in additional runs or add those miles back to another run. Sometimes I’d get lucky and it would all work out, but usually not. We need to learn to listen when our body is trying to tell us something. Running 45 instead of 50 miles probably won’t have any real effect on our training, but picking up an injury most certainly will (ask me how I know!).

So to summarize – run your slow runs slower than you think you should, run your fast runs faster than you want to, and listen to your body. Now if I can manage to listen to my own advice I might actually have a decent set of races this year!

My friend Brennan tweeted this earlier:

That got me thinking. Since November I have done the following races:

• Philly Marathon (with Insulindependence)
• Carlsbad Marathon (with Insulindependence)
• Ragnar Del Sol (with Insulindependence)
• Ragnar SoCal Ultra Team (with Insulindependence)
• ODDyssey (without Insulindependence)

So… there’s that. 🙂