And Now For Something a Little Different

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

Missing the A1c Grade

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 been above 6.5 and I want to tell you there's no good reason for it.

But that would be a lie, because if you want to know where the 6.6 comes from, all you need to do is look at the data, to see for yourself.

This chart shows my past 8 weeks of blood sugars and it shows me three things:

1.) I'm doing a great job of managing hypoglycemia. If you want to "cheat" your A1C, you can do so by having lots of lows. Problem is, a 6.6 can't kill you overnight, but a low can, so avoiding lows is a good thing, and I'm doing a great job of it. A good friend and diabetic athlete blogger, Gary, reminded me of this last night when I was whining on Twitter. I appreciated that.

2.) As you can see, though, I'm spending too much time hanging out at 120-135, rather than 100-120. All those black dots that are within the green? That's good, but they're at the top of the green bar. If I want to lower my 6.6 (which corresponds to an overall average of 143), I need to push those black dots lower.

Action step: Raise basal rates across the board with the goal of hanging out closer to 100 than 130.

3.) Unbeknownst to me, my afternoon blood sugars have been running high. This is a difficult one for me to believe, as it comes after my running and lunch and I was surprised to see myself out of the green (out of the money, so to speak) during these periods. But the best part about data like this: the numbers don't lie.

Action step: Bolus more for lunch. Test more in the PM.

So the bad news is I didn't ace the test this semester. The good news? I'm still in school, and still learning.

The Importance of Calibration

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 when it's way off. Truth is, I can do a lot better.

I've been on a new sensor for 48 hours, now, and made sure to calibrate when things were very calm. Moreover, my calibrations since them have also been in calm periods. The result? Extremely trustworthy numbers. Don't discount the importance of calibration.

And speaking of numbers, I went for my A1C and a slew of other tests last Friday. My prediction before it comes? 6.4 Stay tuned to see how I did!

A Surprising Finish - a Change of Plans

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 endurance would surely take me to the end; my real goal was to stay fast early in the race so that my competition wouldn't get confident.

I went through the first mile in 6:06 - oddly about where I would've tried to be, had I let myself look at my Garmin. I heard them call out 6:12 to the 3rd place runner. I picked up my pace and gradually heard the footsteps fading away. By the time I hit the 2nd mile, I stole a few glances behind me and judged my lead to be closer to 15 seconds.

This particular course has a gentle downhill 3rd mile, which is fortunate. Running downhill is easy, so long as you concentrate on turnover, which I did. I knew if I held my focus, I'd be fine, and I was.

In the end, I came in 2nd place at 19:11 -- 27 seconds faster than I did on this course when I set my PR there last year! Needless to say, I was surprised.

The surprising finish indicates a different level of fitness than I thought I had at this point, which has caused me to re-evaluate my goals. A 19:11 5k runner who trains for a marathon should be able to run a 3:03 marathon if he's properly trained. While I don't believe I'm capable of a 3:03, that's a pretty good cushion over the 3:20 I need to qualify for Boston, so yes, I'm banging that drum again.

Missy's cooked up a plan for me, and if the next few weeks of training go well, I'm going to return to the Bob Potts Marathon, where I ran a 3:26 last year. And while a 3:20 is a lot faster than a 3:26, any serious runner knows that a 19:11 5k is a lot faster than a 19:38 5k. On May 15, if I stay healthy, we'll find out how much faster.