Sweet Victory

My favorite diabetic song + my favorite diabetic event = sweet awesomeness!

It's amazing to me how every facet of my life is marked by numbers. Professionally, I monitor the number of leads we provide to our sales team on a daily/weekly/monthly basis. I do a lot of things at work but at the end of the day, that's the most important thing. Running-wise, my brain is always preoccupied with pacing and mileage -- how much this week, how much today, how fast to hit my goals, eet. And then, there's diabetes, which I have called a lifetime sentence of doing third-grade math 24/7 for the rest of your life. The A1C serves as a diabetic's test in how they did last semester. And yesterday, for the first time in a while, I didn't ace it, coming in with a 6.6. Understand: a 6.6 isn't horrible. It's barely a notch above the 6.5, which is recommended by a group I can't recall at the moment, and it's a good bit below the 7.0 recommended by another group I can't recollect. But the point is, it's the first time in a while I've bee...

So I attended a diabetes fair at Hershey Med last weekend, which was fun. I wore my Team Type 1 jacket, which caused virtually everyone who saw me to say, "You must be a cyclist!" to which I had to correct them about what all Team Type 1 has going on. It was also fun to watch the vendors bad mouth each other -- as a marketing guy who constantly does battle w/ my competition, it was awesome to see a battle where I'm the prize (via my insurance company), rather than the soldier in the fight! I also spent some time with my Medtronic rep, who hooked me up with their CGM several months ago. As always, I said my CGM was good but not great, and he kept banging on me about calibrating only when I'm stable. Though I've heard that many times, on the way home I thought a lot about that and how good I am about making sure I am stable when I calibrate, and truth is: I can do better. I enter a lot of BG's when I'm not stable, and then end up cursing the CGM hours later ...

Three weeks removed from my 50 miler, I went into a local 5k completely unsure of what would happen. On one hand, I've done more mileage over the past 4 months than ever in my life and most running books will tell you that the simplest secret to getting faster is to run more. On the other hand, aside from the occasional tempo run, I hadn't tried anything resembling speedwork since my last 5k, which was in late November, if memory serves. And yet, no more than 100 meters into the race, I found myself in 2nd place. There was never any chance I'd win -- last year's returning champ had shown up in better shape and he took off from the gun. But that soon into the race, I realized something interesting could happen. Rather than rely on my Garmin, I decided less than a quarter of a mile into the race that I had 1 goal: finish in 2nd place. I wasn't sure how that goal would hold up, as I could hear a lot of footsteps behind me. I also decided at that point that my enduranc...