Metabolism?

I live with people who know plenty about the human body. There are also a silly number of medical types in my family. As a result, I have picked up lots of little facts about the human body and how things work. However, my expertise is minimal...


One of the most important things for my care of diabetes is consistency. Consistency brings the ability to predict what my body will do, so that I can nail the food I eat and the insulin I put into my body.

There is one thing that ruins this for me: adaptation.

As my body adapts to a training load, my metabolism shifts. Usually one week into a six week block, very suddenly, the amount of insulin I require drops. This will also happen again late into the block of training. As I go through a recovery phase, it usually resets itself mostly.

This brings both benefits and negatives.

The major negative is that it's hard to tell when these drops will happen, the indicators are often similar to those of much more short terms problems. This means that for one or two days I will get stuck in the middle of a training session (and normally sleep) with a low blood sugar level that requires copious amounts of whatever sugar I can keep nearby.

The major positive is that it is a great indicator of how I'm responding to a training load. It's great rolling into a major race, having only a few weeks earlier received an accountable tip from your body that it's ready to go.

So today I tried to have my morning sleep after training and not getting called in to teach at any schools, only to be woken 40 - 50 minutes in with a low blood sugar. Low blood glucose levels deplete a few things, mainly conscious and coherent thought. Resilience is almost always lost for me in these cases - an athlete's worst nightmare. When I wake with a low blood sugar, it's normally sweating (I promise to divulge the cool thing I've learnt about this another time) and with a desperate desire to down any sweet, sugary food available.

Today, with a second swimming session soon to come, I downed a can of lemonade and two large bowls of corn flakes. My swim warm up resembled the discomfort Ron Burgundy felt as he stumbled down the hot street.

This happens a lot.

Where to with this? Two plans:
1. Make sure I have plenty of gels and sports drink tomorrow for the 2hr swim, 1hr run. Of course, my needle too.

2. Keep on working hard, improve my results and get a chance to spend time with/talk to these guys:
Team Novo Nordisk

Just one of the things I'm going to have to finally grow up and deal with as best as possible this year :)