tempting something, i’m not sure what
this could very well be the most stupidest thing i’ve ever done with regards to my diabetes. but only time will tell. hopefully it’s not my parents saving my life that ends up being the determining factor on just how stupid this is.
you see, a couple hours ago, i was lying on my bed, watching gossip girl (yes, i said gossip girl, which, for the record, is stupider than some of the soap operas these days and it deviates very far from the books, which, really aren’t that good anyways, i think the last time i picked one of them up was last year when i was in the hospital dying in ICU of dka (diabetic ketoacidosis) a case of which, mind you, I didn’t cause, nope, not that time) i digress. so, i was watching gossip girl, and i was on facebook playing space raiders (which i’ve become insanely addicted to, i’m blaming geekgrl, she recruited me) and I was talking to peeps.
i was doing all that, yup, i’m a great multitasker when it’s all mindless, don’t ask me to be as great of a multitasker when things matter, because it just won’t happen. so, i was doing all that when mom came in and asked me for laundry detergent. now, this would never happen in the real world. mom coming and asking me for laundry detergent is unheard of, simply because, we’re never out of laundry detergent, we ALWAYS have more than one thing of laundry detergent. When the last thing of it is opened, it goes on the list, and that list is taken to the store and more laundry detergent is bought before the last opened bottle ever gets down to being half empty.
But this was a special scenario. You see, we’ve not had a washer/dryer operable in our house for 8 weeks now. It’s the pipes fault, the pipes in the concrete slab that leaked fault. And so, mom’s been doing laundry next door at my aunt’s house or at the laundry mat (the laundry mat is where I’ve been going for 8 weeks and so I’ve had my very own personal special thing of laundry detergent that lives in my trunk. and a couple weeks ago, mom gave me some of the same stuff and said that it couldn’t be used in our washer, that she needed something different.)
BUT! tonight, the wood flooring was in, the trim on the wall that goes on the wall above the floor was on, the caulking was complete (all this in the laundry area of course) and so after I had spent a couple hours at the laundry mat, I come home at just the perfect time, to help dad move the washer, from the garage into the house where we’d connect it and it would be available for mom to use when she was done playing cards next door at my aunts house.
and so, while i’m watching gossip girl, playing space raiders, and speaking to my peeps mom comes in exacerbated because she has no detergent. She needs some NOW! because she had already started the washer, and as I’m telling her that all I have is in my trunk and it’s that stuff she can’t use in our washer because she told me so a couple weeks ago she’s trying to get me to get up from my bed and get out to my car to get it.
and so very slowly, so slow i’m slower than a sloth slow, i get up from my bed and go down the hall mumbling about how i’m moving. not moving as in, i’m leaving my house moving, but moving as in i’m moving down the hall, making movement, moving.
i get her the detergent, whatever, go back to my bed, and realize, that something is very wrong, because i’m moving far too slow. i was moving so slow, i might have well been standing still. and so i grab my glucometer, lay down on my bed, prick my finger, turn gossip girl back on, squeeze my finger, and proceed to watch as blood sprays from my finger towards me, and in the process gets all over my freshly washed quilt that i had sprayed blood all over last week. except this week, it didn’t phase me, i continued to watch as it sprayed all over the place, and i continued to squeeze my finger.
i know i noticed, because i was watching it happen, but i didn’t stop to say “hey i just got blood all over my quilt again” no, i watched it spray until it could spray no more and then blood beaded on my finger and I put that blood in the test strip and counted allowed as the meter went 5…4…3…2…1…HEY IDIOT YOU’RE 32.
I get up, pull the quilt off my bed, yell “MOM” and take it to the sink where I repeat last week’s actions. Use cold water, rub the blood gently with my fingers, watch it kindof go away. and then, as opposed to last week’s, i’m crying because i got blood all over the quilt grandma made me and it’s not coming out all the way and i’ve got to go wash it at the laundry mat, i take it and throw it in the dryer and return to my bed and gossip girl and space raiders and my peeps.
and as i’m lying there, i begin to think to myself, how low can i go? will i really die if my blood sugar gets to zero? what does my pump say? and so I look at the graphs at my pump and I see that I’ve kindof flatlined at my low blood sugar. the pump is lying again because it doesn’t think i’m as low as my meter says I am, but i’ve flatlined.
not feeling any symptoms, i continue to watch gossip girl and play space raiders and talk to my peeps. the alarms occasionally go off to tell me that i’m low and i consciously ignore them. yeah whatever, i’m low, it doesn’t feel like i’m low and i’m watching gossip girl and playing space raiders and talking to my peeps so go away.
and then time passes by, one moment it’s 9:18 and then the next moment it’s 10:02 and it’s bedtime. so i close down space raiders, say good night to my peeps and i finish watching gossip girl. and then it’s 10:30. and so i put my pj’s on and go potty and i return to bed and i look at my pump, a nice flat line, and really, after some calculations, i just had to hold that flat line until 11:30 and then i’d have 3 hours of a flat line. it was only an hour more. and that was almost 45 minutes ago at this point.
and so here we are, blogging (because Lolo said i should blog sometime when I’m low, she thought it’d be amusing, but i’m not sure what’s amusing about this) and i’ve got about 20 more minutes to go, and the pump is beeping at me saying “HEY IDIOT, YOU’RE STILL LOW!!!” and i’m like, well duh, but i still don’t feel it, and you’ve got a flat line, so leave me be.
except it says that i’m 46 and the highest number on my flat line trend graph was 54 and i think sometime last week i decided that that flat line really had an 8 point thing. anything lower than the high number but not lower than 8 points of the highest number on that graph counted as a flat line.
so i decided that i can’t drop lower, so i ate an itty bitty part of a glucose tab. but that didn’t really help me because now it says that i’m 44 and my perfect little line is not so perfect anymore. i only had 15 more minutes to go and it broke i dropped lower than 8 pts from 54.
big ole bummer. the cool thing is, 3 hrs of a low, and the worst thing i felt was earlier when i was moving like a sloth.
only 6 more minutes, maybe i can have a straight line with only one little baby blip in it. and then, i can eat, my stomach has started growling. i want a big bowl of cereal.
one stupid little blip. almost a perfectly flat line. one stupid little blip. i’m tempted to let this go for another 3 hours to see what would happen, but i’ve got enough brains at this moment to know that that would be not particularly safe. well, not that what i laid around and did the past 3 hours was safe, but it would be even more stupid to do it for a total of 6 hours.
People Pay Good Money For This Stuff
So, I wanted to go for one more open water swim before the end of the year, and so I asked GeekGrl and she arranged one for this past Friday. And thus, her, Cindy, and I went up to Lake Cochiti.
It has been a long long time since I’ve been up to the lake, and the last time I was there, the water was murky, but I don’t exactly expect a crystal clear composure from Lake Cochiti, it just isn’t going to happen (that I know of).
And so, I was very excited to be going to the lake, that swim was the swim I was going to attempt to swim to the outcrop, which would’ve been 800m out, and 800m back, which would’ve been a mile round trip.
We were all excited when we got to the lake, all happy go lucky, and then with our wetsuits on, and goggles on our head, we walked down to the water and were greeted with a green slime infested shore.
After sticking our feets in it and discovering that really only the surface was like that, we waded out further. Except, out further, the water was still murky, murkier than usual. Cindy was just not impressed with the water, but she was willing to let Misty and I swim if we so pleased.
And I so pleased.
So, I dove in head first and took off. The water out there was so murky, that I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face, at least the last times I was there, I could extend my arm and see it, I just couldn’t see much past it. But that was then, this was now. Fingers right in front of my goggles and I couldn’t see them. And there were these green fuzz balls floating around aimlessly, all over the place. Some were the size of a bouncy ball. It was quite disgusting, but I came to swim, and so I was swimming (I might die because of my choice to swim, but hey, it was worth it, I got to swim).
I went all the way out to the bouy, which is about 200m out. I didn’t necessarily freak out like I normally do either, although, not being able to see anything did cause me discomfort, so I wasn’t so excited about swimming alllllllll the way out to the outcropping. So I turned around. And took my merry time getting back to the shore.
Misty and Cindy waved, and may have been talking to me, in fact, they were talking to me, but I couldn’t hear them, I made that much known, and I swam back to them and reported out on the nastiness of the water. Cindy once again expressed how she wasn’t swimming, “but hey, don’t let me stop y’all”, and then got out of the water.
Misty told me about how people pay for this stuff to be put on them at spas. And all I could think was “eww, why would people pay for this” of course, who am I to say anything, I went swimming in it.
Somedays, it makes me cry
There isn’t a day where I’m not annoyed with diabetes to some degree. Somedays are worse than others.
Today was a worse than others day. It was one of those days where I could do everything right and I wasn’t going to get expected results. These days are the worst for me because when I take the time to make sure I’m doing everything just right, I expect my diabetes to behave appropriately. You’d think that after 16 years with this damn disease that I’d have learned not to expect so much from it. What can I say, I have high expectations for the things in my life (besides, when I do figure out how to make it behave, I’ll be rich and have a mansion of a cabin in the forest, that has a helicopter pad, and an indoor pool).
Today, diabetes handed me a few high things of it’s own. High numbers, all day. Even with a few correction shots, an unscheduled site change, negative ketone checks, and adjusted basal rates, I stayed up in the 200s all day. Worse was that my sensor was reading 60 pts below where I was running (I know the thing isn’t perfect, but there’s a big difference between 10-20 pts and a 60 pt span between my meter and my sensor numbers.) The only thing right about my sensor was the hourly flatlines of where it thought I was running (the longest flatline today was almost 2 hrs long and it showed me in the 140s).
What’s worse is that it hurt every time I pricked my finger, gave myself a shot, or gave a bolus. I don’t know what the problem was, but I could feel everything. That and I wasn’t bleeding when I pricked my fingers and so for any one check there would be between 2-3 finger pricks.
Well, I wasn’t bleeding until tonight anyways. I bled all fine and dandy tonight. It was dinner time and so, as food would have it, I needed to check my blood and I was going to do just that. So I pricked my finger. No blood. So I squeezed it. Still no blood. So I squeezed it harder. I still didn’t think it was bleeding and then I saw it, not a droplet of blood beading on my finger, but a stream of blood shooting up a foot high from my finger.
If there had been a magnifying glass watching this event, it would’ve been like the cap having been unscrewed from a fire hydrant and the water shooting high up into the sky.
Now normally, this wouldn’t have phased me because I’m rarely somewhere where I’d care blood landed when this happens. Granted, I can’t predict when this will happen, but I do know that I’ve never been as traumatized by this happening as I was tonight.
I was standing over my bed. And on my bed wasn’t some comforter with a cover that I didn’t care about on it, no, the quilt Grams made for me 2 Christmas’ ago was on it. And when I saw the blood on it, I freaked out.
The last time my diabetes bled all over me, I had to throw the shirt away because I couldn’t get the blood out of it. Granted, there was a lot of blood, a good eighth of my shirt was covered in it, but that’s the last memory I have of my diabetes, blood, and some form of cloth.
So, while I’m freaking out, I’m yelling at mom “how do I get blood off my quilt?”
Her: “when did it get there?”
Dad: “now”
Mom: “cold water”
this is where I start to cry, because cold water didn’t save my shirt (neither did shout).
So then, I’m standing over the sink with my quilt in it, tears streaming down my face, watching the cold water run over the blood, leaving it there, (if the water had tracks, it’d be leaving the blood in it’s tracks). At this point, I’m muttering about how much I hate diabetes. I kind of touch the blood, afraid of rubbing it in, and then it starts to disappear a little. Eventually, most the blood got washed away, and if you didn’t know where the blood was to begin with, you won’t ever see it. As time passes hopefully my memory of it’s location will disappear as well.
Today was a bad diabetes day.
Wishing I’d Flatline
Okay, Okay, I admit, that may have been a little dramatic. That’s not the kind of flatlining I’m wishing I’d do. Although, if someone wants to flatline like that in my presence, I’d be happy to yell “CODE BLUE”, charge the paddles and yell “CLEAR” and shock them back to life. That would be an exciting day for me.
But, if I ever get around to flatlining the way I want to, that will be an exciting day for me too.
No, the flatlining I want to do, is not easy to make happen, in fact, the longest I’ve managed to do it is over a 30 minute period. What I’d really like to see, is for it to happen over 3 hrs or 24 hrs (because that’s what my monitor shows me). (Thinking I might ever see it over a 24 hour stretch, well, that may be a bit of a stretch). Ok, what am I talking about? I’m talking about rock solid, most glorious blood sugars. Consistent, so consistent, that on my pump, the little CGM (continuous glucose monitoring) graph would be FLAT!
The day I get something that looks like this on my pump screen, is the day I celebrate the fact that I flatlined!
Picture by Stinky Harriet
Well, the day I get something like that and the blood sugars are in a prettier range than where I’ve been seeing mine temporarly flatline lately (up in the 200s), that is the day I’ll be jumping up and down excitedly screaming about how I’ve flatlined.
The world is broken when…
…for some reason at 3:07 in the morning i wake up. no alarms on the pump, no nothing. so i decide i want to see what’s going on and the pump refuses to give me a backlight and i have to get out of bed to turn on a light to see what’s going on.
the pump tells me i need to replace the battery now. that’s fine, i’ve got a spare, but i have to wonder to myself, why wasn’t there an alarm (chances are there was, and I slept through it, and because the battery was low, i only got 1 alarm instead of the incessant annoying array of alarms; the majority of which i sleep through anyways).
do you have any clue how hard it is to find a quarter at this hour of the morning when your brain is screaming “GET YOUR ASS BACK IN THAT BED!!!”? it’s difficult and frustrating (nevermind that my change is always in the same place and that all i had to do was go to the paint can with all the change in it)
when i finally get around to putting the new battery into my pump, i get nothing, blank screen, i wait a moment, and another moment, and yet another moment, still nothing. i take the battery out to make sure i put it in right, rinse and repeat…waiting waiting waiting, still, nothing
at this point I’m forced to wander out to the kitchen, where in the fridge is my parent’s battery store, i have to cross my fingers and hope there’s some triple a’s in the bag. I find 4. I take them all and wander back to my room. I know that they have all been used in some capacity because the only pack of new batteries was the one in which I pulled the last battery out of when I began this process. These 4 were all free floating in a bag with AA, C, D, even some small camera battery. At this point, I’d take what I could get, I just wanted to go to sleep.
I put the first one in…I get nothing…at this point, and it’s early in the game, i’m getting very pissed off. I put the old battery in. of course i get an error about how the battery is no good “failed batt test” it says. all the while, I’m inadvertently giving the batteries from the fridge a moment to warm up (because did you know that we’re not supposed to put cold batteries into our pumps, no they have to be room temperature, not that the pump will tell you that, but if you read the manual it’s one of the warnings you see).
I go back to the batteries from the fridge and try them again, 1 by 1, 4 times, do you think any of them worked. no, they’re stupid. and me with my bullheadedness says, to hell with it all, i’m going back to bed
Just So We’re Clear
When I started this blog it served a single purpose; a place for me to log my journeys of each Tour de Cure I rode in. The first year this blog existed, I rode in 3 Tour de Cures. That’s not exactly a whole lot of blogging and so this blog’s purpose quickly grew. Being a non compliant diabetic for the majority of my diabetic life gave me plenty to write about so I went from just blogging about riding in Tour de Cures to also writing about my past and present experiences with diabetes.
This blog does not exist with the intentions of offending anyone. However, with the large number of readers I have, the various backgrounds of each reader, my deeply rooted opinions, my controversial experiences, and my general bullheadedness it is possible that I will/have said some things that may be offensive to some readers. That being said, I will not apologize to anyone who is offended by the things I write here.
To be completely honest, with the exception of the entries that revolve around the Tour de Cure’s I’ve ridden in, most everything else is written to serve as therapy for me or as a log of events and how my diabetes was handled on those days so that I can make adjustments so that my diabetes can be bettered handled. Most of the time, this blog exists more for me than it does for you.
You as a reader are here as a guest with a window into my life and while I welcome your opinions, the moment an apology is asked for, you are in the wrong. These are my thoughts, my opinions, and my experiences, and they exist here on my blog.
If you’re sitting there scratching your head wondering why, since it is more for me than it is for you, that I write all this online instead of in a notebook then I’d like to point you to the other 26 million diabetics in the United States and the countless millions more in other countries.
For as often as I wish diabetes would disappear as quickly as it appeared, for as often that I wish diabetes would remain an invisible disease in my life, for as often as I wish that diabetes would’ve just killed me instead of letting me live and then torturing me each and every living day of my life, a little bit of me writes because somewhere out there is someone who will find this blog and they’ll understand exactly what I’m going through and exactly what I’m feeling. A little bit of me writes because somewhere out there is a diabetic who will find this blog and they will know that they’re not alone in what they’re feeling. So yes, while it is mostly written for me, it is written publicly because one day, it may help someone.
In a sense, that’s where this blog becomes about you, because you’re here and you’re reading it for a reason.
You’re welcome to come here everyday and read about my antics, my stupidity, my pain, my struggles, my adventures, etc…
You’re welcome to leave comments and let me know what you think on the matters I write about (yes, you can express your opinion).
Just don’t expect an apology for anything that I’ve written, because you won’t get one.
Reminiscent of around the time I turned 13
Somewhere in the year in which I was 12, I was plagued with daily and/or nightly stomach aches. I can remember sitting in the kitchen, in a chair, just crying to mom about how much my stomach hurt and her telling me that there was nothing she could do. I’d mope around the house, I’d curl up on my bed, I’d go lay on the bathroom floor. It was a pretty miserable time in my life. Pepto-bismal didn’t work, mylanta didn’t work, tums didn’t work, peppermint candies didn’t work. Nothing worked on my stomach aches. Well, nothing except for vomiting, that was the only relief I could get from my stomach aches, but that was rough on my throat and I wasn’t exactly a fan of it.
I can remember doctor appointments where I had to drink this white chalky stuff so that they could see in my belly, I remember the ultra sounds. I remember being told that they couldn’t find anything wrong with my stomach that would cause the stomach aches I was getting.
I can remember my 13th birthday where mom had decided that she’d had enough of my stomach aches, and the crying, and the vomiting, and the low blood sugars associated with the vomiting because there was no longer food in my system and there was still insulin in my system and how I’d refuse to eat and so she took me to the ER.
I can remember when I was put on some kind of medication that I had to take 30 minutes before each meal and how that didn’t last long because I hate taking pills. It maybe lasted 2 years max.
That is what this past week has reminded me of. Each night I’ve gone to bed with a stomach ache. Each night I’ve woken up because of the stomach ache. Each night I’ve tried to ignore the fact that I have a stomach ache and feel the need to vomit. Most nights, I ended up worshipping the porcelain god. Over the past week, him and I have gotten reacquainted with each other.
The difference between now and when I was 13, is that I now have a fear of vomiting. While I may gain relief from vomiting, it now causes insurmountable amounts of anxiety. Is once going to be enough. If I vomit more than once is it a product of my stomach ache or is it a case of DKA (diabetic ketoacidosis) in the makings. And while I’m mostly dutiful in making sure that my blood sugars are within an acceptable range and that I don’t have ketones, I still fear that they’ll appear simply because it’s happened in the past. I fear vomiting because once it starts, and if it doesn’t stop, when I finally get around to getting to the ER they usually won’t just pump me full of fluids and give me something to stop the vomiting, they also try to keep me there.
Yes, this past week has been kindof like when I was almost 13, except worse because I’ve got experiences to throw into the mix that cause me anxiety.
I felt the low, and I didn’t like it
It’s been a long time since I’ve felt a blood sugar that was low but not as low as the 30’s and low 40’s. I have hypoglycemia unawareness. I don’t feel my low blood sugars generally. And typically, if I feel my low blood sugars, it’s not so much a feeling so much as it is me seeing something. And by seeing them, I mean that I actually watch my vision tunnel. That’s the one lone symptom that I notice.
Other people can pick up on my lows based on my response times to questions or my suddenly argumentative demeanor and lack of understanding when just moments before I had been fine. Or sometimes I’ll just ramble on and on about nothing at all and I’ll quickly be jumping from one thought to another. Well, okay, that’s not always a symptom, it’s fairly normal; but special peeps with special skillz can pick up on when my persistent rambling is the result of a low blood sugar.
All this to say that unless my blood sugar is <45 or someone else catches it, the only thing catching my lows is my every 2 hour blood checks or my continuous glucose monitor (CGM). None of which are ideal situations. However, because of my severely erratic blood sugars and the overwhelming number of lows I experience (I’d venture to say that I have at least 1 a day) I’ve lost the symptoms to my lows a long time ago. Oh, I just thought of another one. About the time my vision is tunneling, my lips and tongue start to tingle in an atrociously irritating way.
So now, I take you to the last day of Diabetes Training Camp when we were sitting in a circle sharing our highlights of the week. Before we sat down we had locked arms and KR noticed my very sweaty hands and asked if I was low. At that point my blood sugar was 98. A perfectly normal blood sugar. So as we’re sitting there and as time is passing and stories are being told, my blood sugar is dropping. But, because the alarms on my CGM are turned off, I was unaware of what my blood sugars were doing. That was, until my head became very very light and my eyelids became very very heavy.
I sat there on the floor for a bit feeling these feelings. At one point, I had a thought that if I didn’t get up, I wasn’t going to be able to get up at all. My entire body was becoming as though it were a lead weight. I waiting until the person speaking was through and worked hard to get up (I really wanted to crawl).
I went to my backpack and sat down only to realize that my meter was at the table. I grabbed my bottle of glucose tabs and again fought to get up to get to my meter. This time, I sat in a chair. I didn’t last long there.
I desperately tried to get my fingers dried because the first finger prick didn’t lend to the beading of blood, it just flattened out and ran over my finger (this is only normal when I’ve exited the pool). When I finally got my blood checked, I was 60. WTF!?! What I was feeling for that blood sugar was so far from normal that I didn’t know what to think. I grabbed the glucose tabs and poured half of them into my sweaty hands. As I began eating them, I knew I was going to fall out of the chair so I slumped to the ground, laid down and continued to shove glucose tabs into my mouth.
I was lying there, on the floor, my legs bent at my knees and they began to shake. I clench the muscles to try to hold them still but it wasn’t happening. I think if I had to compare it to something, I’d say that it was like trying to support a structure such that it wouldn’t move or even wiggle the slightest bit in an earthquake. Being that way, I straightened out my legs and let them continue to shake and laid there with my hands on my belly, my shirt soaking up my sweat My mind was void of my own thoughts and I was listening to all the peeps talk of their highlights of the week.
At that point, I had probably eaten between 12-15 glucose tabs. It was seriously half the bottle. That’s a lot in case you’re wondering. The next thing to happen was me getting nauseous. I don’t do well with being nauseated when I’m not low. Being low compounded my issue with nausea. There was no way I was going to be able to get up from the floor if I had to vomit. At that moment in time, I was not in a good place at all.
I continued to lie there and mentally tried to will the nausea away. And then, I started to shiver. But it wasn’t a shiver because I was cold shiver. No, this shiver, I don’t know what it was, but it was fierce enough to make my teeth chatter.
That was my low, I was all of 60 and I didn’t like feeling it, not one bit. I really don’t want to ever feel anything like that ever again.
Workin’ on that Positive Mental Attitude
All week this week, I’ve been at Diabetes Training Camp; and because of an injury I brought back to life during my second triathlon and then further aggravated in my first half marathon, I’ve not been able to do all I wanted to do.
So, I’ve been kind of bummed, and I was thinking that because I was injured camp was a waste of money. I just haven’t been doing all that I wanted to do and therefore wasn’t getting my money worth. But then, I had a thought the other day, and it was one of those fleeting thoughts that I’ve been trying to focus on because it actually turned what I perceived as bad into something positive. And really, I teeter totter between the negative of my injury and the positive of me having it, and what it really boils down to is Laura and the PMA that she’s been demonstrating and filling my mind with.
So, what the deal is, it’s that I have a knee injury, and it originally occurred when I was 16 when I was swimming. I have in my left knee chondromalacia with patellar femoral dysfunction. Simply put, my knee cap doesn’t track properly and it hurts a lot. Because of it, I’m currently unable to run, I’m in pain when I cycle for long distances, and even swimming is hurting it right now because most of my kick is coming at my knee and not so much from my hip.
As a result of this, my training season has come to pretty much a complete stop. I’m not allowed to run, which very much goes with the “I can’t run” thought process. I can cycle, but I gotta listen to my body, and basically, my knee bruises just above the knee cap when I cycle and it starts to hurt after about 20 miles, so cycling will be very limited. I’m allowed to swim, but not great distances. I can start swimming for distance after I get my technique down (which I’ve been working on all week and will discuss later in another entry).
So, that’s the bad and the disappointing. But then, here we go with the positive side of it. If I had not had this injury, this particular week, I probably would not have spent the time to talk with the various peeps available to us here at camp this week. I’m surrounded by DR’s, nutritionists, a sports psychologist, physical therapist, coaches, and more that I can’t list because I can’t remember titles and my brain is exhausted. I most likely wouldn’t ever have listened to any of the lectures with the great interest that I’ve had this week. I’d have filled my schedule with as many sporty sessions as possible.
I’ve learned so much from the lectures, mostly, it was a lecture from Rick Crawford (who coached Lance Armstrong years ago). It was as though his lecture was tailored just for me. It hit me hard. (you’ll get more about that later). And the one on one consultations have been immensely helpful. And realistically, the one on one consultations and listening to the lectures most likely wouldn’t have happened if I had been uninjured.
Skirt Stud and Skirtless
Months ago when I signed up for Diabetes Training Camp, I was informed of a run that happened the night before camp called the Skirt Chaser 5k. So, of course, I registered. Not much thought needed there. I did register as a guy though so that I could get the surf shorts (because I didn’t want a running skirt). Keep this in mind, because it’s an important detail.
So, after driving to Denver Saturday morning (the day before camp starts) I meet my friend Laura for the first time (she’s way cooler in person, like, cool not in person, but way cooler in person.) She ran with me in the first ever Denver Skirt Chaser, and now, this is cool, because generally when it comes time to races there’s the “yeah, i’ll do that with you” but there’s usually not the same keeping of pace. And you gotta realize, I’m slow, especially because the elevation (I didn’t run but maybe a quarter mile before I couldn’t breathe, it maybe had something to do with the sinus infection I had, but whatever the case, I couldn’t breathe) and my knee was a wreck (I got warned about running this 5k after my left knee’s not so great performance in my half marathon. I was told to let it rest, do I listen, no. Do you think i’m listening now? if you said no, you’re wrong, I’ll not be running for a while.) So Laura, she ran the whole thing with me, and she’s a good runner, she could’ve full out run that 5k and done really well, but, she ran it with me instead (while I do think it’s cool, I still think she should’ve full out run it).
So, the skirt chaser, how it works is, the girls go first, and we’re followed by the guys. There were about 1000 runners and 70% of us were girls.
So Laura and I go check in and get our bibs and our clothes. Well, I got my clothes. As I said, when I registered I wanted the surf shorts so I registered as a guy, so my bib said on it “skirt stud” so that they’d know what clothes to give me. Laura’s said “skirtless” because she didn’t sign up for clothes. So we’ve got skirt stud and skirtless. Except skirt stud wasn’t impressed with the shorts because they weren’t surf shorts, they were like, men’s running shorts that went to the knees. So, I traded them in for a skirt for Laura. And then, the technical Tee that I got, I traded that in for a singlet. So I ended up with the full women’s outfit that I originally didn’t want. So, skirtless ended up getting a skirt and skirt stud, well…i don’t know what to say there…
The run…
It was a 5k you know, not that long, I can usually almost full out run a 5k because I know it’s short, if I’m sucking wind at the end, it doesn’t really matter that I went full out because there’s nothing after that initial 3 miles. That was not the case this time (which, to me is disappointing because last week I ran amazing speeds the first 4 miles of my half marathon, I don’t know where they came from, but they were amazing.) So about a quarter mile into the race, which was up a hill (this will become important later) I couldn’t breathe. So the walk run began. Then about a half mile into the race, it went down hill, this created huge problems for me with my knee (I’ve not blogged about my knee yet, so I’ll give you a brief explanation, my knee cap doesn’t track right and so it really hurts going down hills, they’re the worst).
So our first mile was pretty decent, it was about a 12 minute pace, which for me is better than my typical average, and then, I pretty much walked. Laura jogged along side of me, she even ran backwards for a bit along the way. We crossed the finish line together in 42:02.
We had a lot of fun.
