The run on Saturday went pretty well — 5.5 miles on an out-and-back, I did the out part in about 30:20, turned it around and came back faster some in spite of it being more uphill than downhill.

Sunday morning I got up at 5:15.  Blood sugar was 63 mg/dL then, I popped a gluose tablet of 4g carbs, injected 2u of Novolog because of what was to come, made some coffee, drank a couple of cups and then dressed and drove to the nearest high school track.  It was empty.  My blood sugar at 6:03 AM had risen to 95 mg/dL and I began my warmup to then take on trying to run one mile as fast as I could.  I started running about 6:10 AM.

I had thought I should be able to break 8 minutes.  After 4 laps of warming up, my first lap of the mile, well 1600 meters, 9 meters short of a full mile, my first lap clocked in at 2:02.81.  I only saw the 2:02 and realized that under 8 minutes was no sure thing, my first lap had been run pretty hard, didn’t feel like I had started too hard but I didn’t feel like I could accelerate any without running the risk of crashing during the 3rd or 4th laps.  The second lap took 2:04.51, I only saw 2:04 and I knew than that getting under 8 was not likely going to happen.  I was having to work harder it felt like to maintain pace.  I just tried to hold on during the 3rd lap and it came in slightly slower, 2:05.89 and I knew then I wasn’t going to break 8 minutes.  Still, with a sense of relief that only one lap remained, my legs began to work harder and as much as a slow person like me can accelerate, I accelerated slightly with a view of trying to see if I could accelerate again at around halfway and then at the final turn.  I was rewarded with a lap under 2 minutes — 1:56.99.  I then slowed down and worked my way around the track 4 more times for a cooldown and a total of 3 miles.

8:10.20.   I ran an 8:14 mile at a 5K on 12-31-2007, but that mile was mostly downhill.  I ran 8:04 for a mile in May, but I can’t say that I’m confident that Mapmyrun and mouse clicks are accurate measuring tools.

I can’t say my pacing was too far off from being ideal, although the fact that my final lap was almost 9 seconds faster than my 3rd lap indicates that I probably missed ideal pacing some.  Not surprising, it’s something that you need to practice and gain a feel for.  But would have ideal pacing given me under 8 minutes?  I don’t think so.

Legs didn’t feel completely spry yesterday, maybe that was an effect.  It was also upper 60s and a bit humid which probably slowed me a bit.

Then there is the insulin problem.  Running a mile like that is largely running using glucose being burned for energy.  The muscle fibers need to burn something so they can contract and drive the legs.  Insulin is necessary to help move glucose from the bloodstream into the muscle.  I point this out because when I tested my blood sugar after running yesterday I had spiked up to 150 mg/dL.  Now assuming that a normal person’s blood sugar would remain close to steady in a hard effort like that, for me that means I was about 1.5 units short of the insulin needed during that time of running.

But how do you deliver 1.5 units of insulin as needed in a time frame of 30 minutes when you’re using an insulin that take 4 hours to be absorbed into the bloodstream.  A simple gross calculation says I would need to have injected 12 units of insulin at 5:15 AM, but that gross calculation uses a flat uptake profile.  Novolog takes about 4 hours to absorb, the peak absorption is at around 1.5 hours following subcutaneous injection.  So let’s rough cut it down to 9 units of insulin to inject 1 hour before the running.  But then I have the problem of all that frontloaded insulin to feed before the running.

Yeah, right.  It’s a problem, isn’t it?  I can game the system a bit by going the intramuscular routte.  I’ve found that I can inject Novolog into muscle tissue and it’ll be used up in 2 hours, with peak uptake about 45 mintues to 1 hour following IM injection.   But I still can’t really inject a whole humpload of insulin just to get all that insulin I need to help out in a hard mile run.

It basically means that all other things being equal, assuming an identical person to me except his pancreas works properly, I will always be slower in the mile than that non-pancreatically challenged doppleganger.

I kind of need to find out though whether a normal person’s blood sugar remains steady running a mile like that.  Maybe I’ll see about recruiting my brother for some tests on that.