20 plus

So around a quarter to 8 this morning, I began running. I would for the longest time I’ve ever run and consequently ran the farthest I’ve gone. 20.5 miles.

Blood sugars were much better on this run. I was at 159 mg/dL before starting, I injected 1u of insulin on top of the 2u I had injected 30 minutes before and set out doing the loops. After the first 5 loops, I stopped and checked. Blood sugar had gone up to 169. I feared it getting higher and me getting insulin resistant. I injected another unit. 5 loops later I had dropped to 141. I let it ride. 5 more loops and I was at 96. Time to start using the peanut butter M&Ms. I ate about 3/4 of the pack over the next 5 loops. Blood sugar was at 88 mg/dL. I had 5 loops left. I finished off what remained in the open pack and opened another for a bit more. When I finished, the blood sugar was at 75 mg/dL.

I had also checked my blood ketone level when I woke up today. It was 0.2 mmol/l. At the end of the run, it tested at 0.5 mmol/l. I burned some fat while running today. Here are the splits –

l1 — 9:35
l2 — 9:26
l3 — 9:16
l4 — 9:15
l5 — 9:03 46:35

l6 — 9:19
l7 — 8:47
l8 — 9:00
l9 — 9:11
l10 — 9:07 45:25, 1:32:00

l11 –9:10
l12 — 9:02
l13 — 8:39
l14 — 9:08
l15 — 8:49 44:49, 2:16:49

l16 — 9:03 2:25:52
l17 — 9:04
l18 — 8:46
l19 — 9:04
l20 — 9:10 45:07, 3:01:56

l21 — 9:11
l22 — 9:04 3:20:11
l23 — 9:30
l24 — 8:57
l25 — 9:05 45:47, 3:47:43

My legs didn’t feel too bad by the end. My quads were complaining a bit on the last two loops. If I had wanted to, I could have kept going, but there was no sense in beating my legs thoroughly into submission. Today was enough. I ran well, I ran smart, I managed being a type 1 diabetic while running for almost 4 hours. I did good.

a deal with running should always be negotiable

It’s a good forecast for tomorrow — lows overnight around 50, cloudy tomorrow morning. It should be much more comfortable than the 18 miler of 2 weeks ago.

Last evening, I negotiated the following deal with my legs — I’d run easy for 3.4 miles after running Tuesday and lifting on Wednesday, then I would run 8x.2 mile intervals with full walking recoveries in between.

I ran the 3.4 miles at 10:20 pace. Then the intervals went as follows –

1:22.7
1:18.16
1:23.08
1:18.23
1:20.62
1:16.87
1:17.8
1:11.89

I ran that last one as hard as I could since it was the last one. Guess I was a bit of a slacker on the 3rd one, not sure why that one was so slow.

Tomorrow the goal is to go 20+ miles. I need to make sure I start it off nice and easy, I want to have plenty left to work with when I get up over 18 miles. Hopefully my blood sugars will be in a better range than the 18 miler and I will get to test my fueling strategy again for when I’m running for longer than 2.5 hours.

redemption

Last Wednesday featured a bad fail for my lifting. I guess it wasn’t too bad when I got 7-6-4 on my reps for the power cleans of 120 lbs and I wasn’t too surprised that the overhead presses came up short with 6-3-2, but it was the front squats that said more than anything it was bad. I put the 115 lbs on the bar, cleaned it up to the rack position on my shoulders, squatted down and couldn’t go back up for a single rep. This was after the prior workout where I had done 6-6-4. So anyhow, that’s when I said enough is enough and decided to look forward to how I wouldn’t be lifting over the weekend to come since I would be up in Montreal and without access to a barbell. Plus I just needed some extra rest, that was apparent.

Last night the power cleans succeeded, 8-6-4. I knew I would come up short on overhead presses, this time I got 6-4-3, so a couple more reps than last time. But it was the squat that was scaring me. I knew it was extremely unlikely, but what if it happened again? What if I got to the bottom and couldn’t squat back up?

It was with great relief that after I racked the bar, took a few deep breaths and went down for my first rep, that I came up out of the bottom fairly easy. My glutes and hamstrings started me up and the quads came into play as I got further up. I churned out the reps at a nice steady pace and felt good and solid on all of them. The set of 6 went well too and the set of 4 got done nice and quick.

My legs were rested. My legs were stronger. So next time it’ll be power cleans at 125 lbs, overhead presses of 105 lbs, and front squats of 120 lbs.

—–

Plan to run around 5 miles after work today.

rested again

It felt like I got rested when I ran yesterday. With fewer miles run and only the abbreviated lifting session on Wednesday last week, the legs got time to recover. Yesterday’s run the legs felt strong and light, I was able to run about 10 min/mile pace using 10 minute runs and 1 minute walk intervals with it feeling fairly easy. I picked it up over the last mile and ran that in about 9:10. Then I set about to running 3 half-mile intervals where I took full walking breaks in between.

The first half-mile came in at 3:54.42 which is what I was hoping to see at least. Last year when I ran 800m intervals my best time on any of them was 4:06. The second interval was done in 3:49.15 and I knew that the final one should be even faster. I didn’t look at my watch while running the last one, I just tried to run a bit harder than my perceived effort of the last one, especially a bit harder over the distance between .1 and .3 miles where on the previous intervals I had throttled back some. The third interval came in at 3:41.50. Nice, better than 7:30 min/mile pace.

I’ve been doing that this month, throwing intervals on after a run about 3 to 3.5 miles. It’s given me 7.2 miles of fast running this month in a cumulative time of 51:38.56. The left foot has been feeling fine with it, the soreness is all gone and the tight weird feeling is gone. I can still sense how the foot is a bit different from the right, but it’s much less all the time now.

Tonight the hope is to do much better on my sets and reps for lifting.

Then I’ll run another 5 miles again tomorrow with some intervals for the last 1.5 miles of distance and on Saturday see about going more than 20 miles ever for the first time in my life.

5.8

Got my results for the blood drawn for HbA1c last week, 5.8%. I had thought the couple of tough weeks before the draw might skew me up towards 6%. So the doctor was happy with that result.

—-

I was up in Montreal over the weekend. It was dark and gloomy on Saturday, but I had a good time doing nothing with the woman I love. Sunday was sunny, although very windy. We ran 10 miles together in a park with trails and trees, which helped break up the wind.

I love her now more than ever. It just feels better and better the more I get to know her and the more she knows about me. We don’t always agree but there is never anything venomous in disagreements.

Leaving always sucks though. It seems especially insulting to have to leave the one you love and then go into airport security screening. Yesterday, I got chosen for more thorough inspection, including using the wand metal detector on me and a security official going through my carry on bag and jacket and a pat down search. Yeah, that sucked. But at least I got lucky with my customs official. He looked at my passport, said my name, commented how it’s a bit of tongue twister and I said, “Yeah, it is, but you said it very well.” Then he glanced at my declarations form and sent me through. I wish it was always like that.

crackberry entry

When you’re used to touch typing it’s hard to look to find the keys.

a rapid basal shift

I’ve been getting flummoxed on my control the past 2 weeks or so. I actually saw an 7-day average on my glucose meter above 140 mg/dL. This morning I got blood drawn for an A1c, I’m expecting I may very well see something like 6.1 or 6.2.

It took me some days to decide that my basal dose wasn’t covering me. I began seeing high blood sugars waking up in the morning, I had thought maybe it was because I had been eating dinners with some extra fat and I was getting the delayed digestion effect. But I also began seeing that my bolus shots for meals weren’t getting me right either and it finally registered in my head that I must need more basal insulin.

As it’s looking, it’s quite a bit more basal insulin in a just a few short weeks. My dose had been at 20u Lantus a day, last night it looks like I finally got good overnight fasting with a shot of 28u.

I’m thinking maybe this is an effect of my current training, running 3x a week with 2 lifting sessions. Plus I’m doing a lift I haven’t done much of before, I’ve done a whole bunch of power cleans, a lift that calls for rapid recruitment and firing of a lot of muscles all at once. I wonder if my body is responding to this by trying to increase the amount of available glucose for the muscles to burn for the power cleans.

Last night was my first bad lifting workout in a while. Even before I started, I had a sense like I should bail on it, let it go, get some extra rest. I told myself I was being lazy and set to work on it anyway. On the power cleans of 120 lbs, I got 7, 6, and 4 so next time I do this the weight will remain the same. 105 lb overhead presses were terrible, the very first rep was a struggle and I only got 6, 3, and 2. Ouch. By then I could feel it just wasn’t happening, but I forged ahead anyhow and figured since I won’t be lifting over the weekend, I should at least try to do the front squats. I put 115 lbs on the bar, got it racked on my shoulders, went down into the bottom for the first rep and I had nothing. Nothing. Nothing at all. I had to dump the weight forward because I couldn’t even come back up for a single rep. More ouch. Thus the workout ended. So I’ll rest this weekend from that and depending on how my body feels, I will try again Wednesday next week.

——————–

Phillies won last night. National League Champions 2 years in a row now.

somehow I stayed up

to see one of the greatest wins in Phillies history. It may have been even better than last year’s game 4 in LA when Matt Stairs hit that shot off of Broxton in the 8th inning. That game was tied then, last night the game went into the 9th and the Phils were behind. So Broxton walks Stairs on 4 pitches and then hits Carlos Ruiz with a pitch. After Dobbs hits a weak flare to 3rd for the 2nd out, Rollins laces a line drive to the wall in right-center. Game over. When I first saw the hit, I thought Tie game, woot! Then I realized that Ruiz would be running from first and I started yelling, Go go go!

Then there it was. Game over.

Then I crawled into bed after turning everything off.

Plan to run a few miles after work today. Legs felt decent.

18 miles

It was a tough long run. Weather conditions weren’t ideal, a bit wet, a bit windy, a bit chilly. My legs complained some especially late in the run about the power cleans and front squats on Saturday. I also had trouble with my blood sugars on the run. I drank too much coffee and it seemed to spur my liver into overdrive, dumping glucose into me.

When I started the run, the blood sugar was 207 mg/dL. Since I had injected 2u of Novolog about 30 minutes earlier, I decided to be cautious and inject 1 more unit. 4.1 miles later, the blood sugar was at 212. I injected another unit. 4.1 miles after that, the blood sugar was still over 200. I injected another unit.

After having gone half-marathon distance, the blood sugar was finally moving down, 183. But I was in a bit of a pickle. I probably would have let that go without doing anything if I just needed to finish the run. But I had to do something else, I needed to test on whether or not I could eat food for carb replacement, do that without the trouble that some people have of it making them sick and puking. I needed to find out if I could stomach food. So I injected 2u of Novolog, put the pack of peanut butter M&Ms in my pocket and went out for the almost 5 miles left to do. With 3 miles left to go, I opened up the M&Ms, walked and ate all of them to see how they would sit in my stomach. There was no trouble with that.

The problem was that when I finished, blood sugar was up to 236 mg/dL. Now my blood sugar going up about 50 mg/dL if my start point was 100 is no problem. But one thing I’ve learned over time is that when my blood sugars get up over 200 mg/dL, it definitely makes sustained exertion difficult. So I basically ran almost all of those 18 miles yesterday up over 200 mg/dL.

That was frustrating because early on it felt like the run had great potential. I ran the first 4.1 miles in 46:01, a nice improvement over the prior week’s first 4.1 miles of 47:40. At 8.2 miles, I was almost 2 minutes ahead of the prior week’s pace. Then the wheels just slowly came off and I’d only be ahead of the HM split by 7 seconds. At that point, the run was just about doing what I could and finding out about whether I could eat food.

It’s an easy cutback week this week. And off to Montreal on Friday.

change of plans

A noreaster continues to make things miserable here. This morning I decided to push my long run back to tomorrow in hope that the weather will improve enough. Running more than 3 hours for 18 miles in cold rain and wind is probably not the best really. If the weather doesn’t improve enough tomorrow, I’ll have to go to drastic backup plan — run a short distance tomorrow to get my weekly mileage up over 10 then run long Monday after work.

I did my lifting instead today. I hit the power cleans at 115 lbs, got the overhead presses this time with 100 lbs, but failed on the front squats of 115. After my 6th rep of the first set, I felt that the next attempt would fail. So I unloaded. As I rested up for the next set, I thought about it and realized that I had not done a good job of using my glutes to get up out of the bottom. I had been letting the quads pull my knees my back in and it made me tilt forward. So when I loaded up for the next set, I focused hard on getting my glutes and hips to drive me up straight and keep the torso erect. It made a difference. I hit the sets of 6 and 4. So next time it’ll be power cleans at 120 lbs, overhead presses at 105 lbs, and front squats at 115 lbs again.