How Running Is Making Me A Better Type 1 Diabetic
Dear reader, thank you for being here! It means the world to me.
I have one small act of kindness to ask you 😁 In my recent articles, I have experimented with a longer, more in depth and essay-type form of writing. I am enjoying writing longer form articles, but I your opinion counts more.
Are you enjoying longer articles/essays? Or you’d rather read shorter one?
Feel free to let me know in the comments!
As I write, there is no cure to type 1 diabetes. That sucks. But that is also a great stimulus! Think about that: there is a gap to bridge, the one between normal life and life with type 1 diabetes. And while the amazing community of scientists and researchers does its best to discover what today feels like an impossible dream, the biggest mistake each and anyone of us can do is to sit there and wait.
We all have the immense power and responsibility to take ownership of our lives, and as soon as we do that, solutions start to pop up. They might not be definitive and have a “DIY” feel, but they can be just enough to conduct a life worth living, despite (thanks to?) diabetes. We all have full ownership of our lifestyle, and there are so many right things we can do every day to compensate for the current lack of the “magic pill”!
We just need to find out the catalysis of this process, that one element that puts us on the right path and is powerful enough to cascade its benefits into everything else. I call this element the ecological mission: something that we choose to pursue, and the pursuit of which automatically puts many other pieces of the puzzle into the right place.
How we conduct our life, our daily lifestyle, is arguably the best DIY cure for type one diabetes and can bring us closer to that “maybe there’s a way out…” sort of feeling.
Everyone is different, but there are some actions that constitute a common ground for all us human beings, and in this common ground we find sleep, nutrition and exercise.
Which one is the best I have no idea.
All I can tell you is that Running - the exercise element - is what has put me on that path. Running has been the catalysis of my process of deep transformation, and has drastically improved any area of my life I can think of, ranging from food and nutrition, to sleep and recovery, to work and career, to relationships and emotional health.
Running: The One Change That Ruled Them All
Little did I know about the journey that was awaiting me when I first laced up a random pair of running shoes at the age of 16. I had been diabetic for one year, never ran before and years of sedentariness had made me a skinny fat, out of shape, unhealthy teenager.
I had no knowledge of what I was eating, nor why, nor had I considered its effect on my health. Sleep was not even in my horizon of concerns: I was a teenager and very much keen to all nighters with my friends.
That first run changed this. I didn’t know it but it did. It was nothing immediate - the first “results” only started to appear six years later - but I consider that day as the first snowflake, the first of many tiny changes that slowly, steadily and naturally generated a big snowball of benefits over the years. I had no plans to run marathons, ultramarathons, triathlons and trails.
I wasn’t interested in eating well (I still considered pizza a healthy meal). I didn’t care that sleep and rest are the foundation of health, and I surely wasn’t concerned with my diabetes numbers all that much. Time in range, daily insulin intake and average blood glucose were all over the place, one number being the same as the other.
Now I do care about all this. And I do because of running.
Let me explain.
Laying Down The Brics: Rebuilding Myself On My Runs
I am not kidding when I claim that setting the ambitious goal of running my first marathon changed my life, but it took some time for that day to come.
After that first run at 16, I went for a few more and got a knee injury. Many orthopedics and physiotherapists told me my body was just not made for running (a bunch of b*llshit, you’ll see) and that it would be better for me to let it go. Unfortunately, I followed the doctor’s advice and took the easy way out, I stopped running.
But those early attempts at physical activity had build some momentum and I did not let a knee injury interrupt that.
So I exploited that momentum to go all in on calisthenics and power yoga, and biking and walking became my preferred ways to commute. In other words, I had reshaped my identity, going from couch potato to “a person who’s just active every day, somehow”.
And without necessarily knowing it, all that exercising was forcing me to study and refine my blood sugar strategies, iterating and improving them day after day after day.
With time I became more expert and confident, so when the time came to pick up running again, I was (more) ready. I had also matured as a person, so I was moved by a different set of reasons.
First, I had read many books on movement and the human nature, and understood that it did not make much sense that “you’re not made for running”. Humans have evolved moving their legs to chase animals and scout territories, so I wanted to understand the causes of my injuries, solve them and keep running as I, by nature, am supposed to do (you are too).
Second, physical exercise is one of the most effective weapons in our type-1 diabetes arsenal to annihilate insulin resistance, keep our body healthy and stabilize our blood sugars. With this perspective, I coupled strength training with running, and the mix became not only a fun way to spend my spare time but also one of the best medicines to treat my condition. Through my example, I could perhaps inspire others in my same condition to get going.
Third, I wanted and needed the “excuse” to forge my mind, and physically demanding stuff looked like the perfect excuse. I wanted to learn to embrace the suck - and the entire spectrum of feelings and emotional states a person is subjected when running in the absence of motivation, or when even standing up from bed feels impossible, when it rains so much you can’t even see your feet, in the freezing cold of a winter morning, in the boiling heat of a summer day, at altitude, when tired, and on and on.
In essence, running had the exact profile and features of the magic ingredient that will improve your life that all the self-help book I had read were talking about.
I knew that to make it work I had to invest a little time into preparing my body and “reconstruct” it. So I stopped all the casual running that had led to all of my injuries and invested time and effort in a Running School Program, where I learned how the body works and its biomechanics, spent tens of hours doing toe-mobility exercises, plyometrics, deep squat position. Turned out it was not my body being “not made for running” (as orthopedics who wanted to sell me orthotics had brainwashed me to believe). My 21st century lifestyle - sitting on chairs all day long, wearing shoes that kill the feet, gradually weakening the body by not moving it enough -were the problem. Tackling these lifestyle aspects was enough to make all my IT band syndrome, plantar fasciitis and low back pain disappear and never comeback.
With a renewed body and a supercharge of intrinsic motivation, the idea of my first ecological mission started to come to life.
My First Ecological Mission: Running A Marathon With Type 1 Diabetes
The big question remained how to tackle all of these challenges at once. I was driven and motivated (still am!), but I wanted to do so much!
I needed a plan to keep my runner’s body healthy, one to smoothen out my type 1 diabetes, one to develop and forge my mind and become a better human. In all this I was also trying to clean my diet and improve the quality of my sleep. That’s a lot!
Needless to say that attempting to come up with and follow a different plan for each of these would’ve been a guaranteed failure, if I ever had found the courage to tackle so many different challenges all at once.
One plan to fix my body and stay fit. One plan to master my diabetes, increase my time in range and optimize my insulin sensitivity. One plan to go beyond my limits, forge my mind and reshape my identity. One plan to clean out my diet, eat more green light foods and get rid of anything processed or highly refined. One plan to improve the quality of my slumbers and finally learn what it means to be rested, truly rested.
It would be a dream to find only one thing, one thing, the pursuit of which would force me to get all of these pieces in the right place. One goal to pursue, one process to set up, one process to follow, so many pieces of the puzzle that have to fall into place for it to happen…
Found it! Run a marathon!
Why Training For A Marathon With Type 1 Diabetes Was My Bang For The Buck
The preparation to run a marathon creates the perfect conditions to leave nothing to chance and required me to master several things at once. Allow me go into details.
In order to run a marathon injury free (and keep running afterwards), I would have to understand the biomechanics of my body, get the right mobility and strength back, allow my body to gradually gain back all the hardware (muscles, tendons, mobility, core strenght, aerobic capacity) and software (cadence, posture, technique) that are required to make every step a standing ovation for the body and soul, rather than a pain.
Goal “morphing the body into an injury free machine”: check.
Running with type 1 diabetes can be dangerous if one goes about it without a clear understanding of the factors that determine a stable blood glucose. You can get away with a short run, but as soon as the distances and time outside increases (training runs of 20, 25, 30 kilometers, two to three hours of running), then having a plan to avoid hypoglycemia and minimize the risk of hyperglycemia becomes an imperative. This requires extreme discipline around food, insulin timing and dosing, a careful observation of what happens with each training run and a painstaking number of notes to analyze which strategy works and what doesn’t. For instance, if for this run eating food X and injecting Y units of insulin shoot my blood glucose to the moon during the run, then for the next run I might want to either inject a bit more, consider an alternative snack, or review my insulin timing. All of this requires pen and paper, and the will to sit down and write notes and learn from them. Nobody will do this for you.
Goal “become a black belt type-1 diabetes master”: check.
To reach the point where you can run and enjoy 42 kilometers you have to commit to train and teach the mind to stay focused. You train when the weather is perfect, when it is freezing cold, when it rains, when it boils. You train when you’re fully motivated and when you’d rather binge watch movies on the couch or lay in bed. You train when you’re in a good mood and when you’re angry at the world. You keep running even on those days when you think you’re near the end of the workout, then you look at the watch and realize you’re barely one third through it. And even on those days when your mind seems to scream that running sucks. Any of these circumstances redefines a limit, reshapes a corner of the brain, unveils an untapped potential and resurfaces an unexplored, hidden strength.
Goal “forge the iron mind”: check.
While all of this happens, marathon training is a ton of running volume, tons of calories burned, a whole bunch of glycogen stores to keep filled and plenty of damaged muscles to repair. You can only take care of this with a spot-on diet and an even more spot-on rest and recovery schedule. It follows logically that if you want to run tomorrow, you have to know how to top up your glycogen stores properly. And once you’re done, you must replenish them up again to fuel the next session. You could do that with junk calorie dense food, but you don’t because you know that the nutrition content of foods is just as important, so you go for whole plant based carb rich foods. These not only keep your carbs up with virtually zero effort, but they replenish you with minerals, vitamins, micro and macro nutrients that are essential for your body to function and stay injury free.
Once you’ve digested all of that bounty, you’re ready to hit the bed and get your good quality slumber in. You know how many hours you need to be completely rested because if you get less than that amount on a consistent basis you get injured and depressed. And by the way, I challenge anyone to run the weekly mileage of a marathon prep and not staring at their bed with tears of joy in the evening.
Goal “Get nutrition and sleep right, with no excuses”: check. (And note that when nutrition and sleep are properly understood and taken care of, time in range and insulin sensitivity improve naturally as a consequence.)
This is everything I had planned to achieve. I had organized my myself and gpt busy to make it happen.
As the training progressed I’d write down everything after every session: how I fueled, how much insulin I had injected, how I felt, how was my blood sugar, etc.
My time in range and glucose stability improved. Exercise surely helped, but I attribute a big chunk of the improvement to a more virtuous food consumption. It soon became clear that more processed foods where the cause of blood glucose spikes and of the unpredictably that could put my runs in danger, so I quickly replaced refined (and inflammatory) foods with whole, nutritious ones. As a result, with steadier blood sugars, my runs became easier to plan and manage.
My time in range outside of running, of course, was getting much better too! Fasting blood glucose levels flattened, with all the physical and mental health benefits that steady blood glucose brings.
On top of that, I turned into a pro sleeper. With a full time job and several other commitments, I had no choice but to become a master at resting in order to perform well in every area. I dove deep into the science of sleep, did some good sleep hygiene and became comfortable with saying “no” to late night activities. Better sleep not only helped me emotionally, but it kept me away from food cravings and from injuries.
Lastly, long runs taught me to embrace the fatigue and the suck of a challenging situation, a skill that I could soon apply at the workplace and in other life circumstances - like when you want to scream out of frustration because your life with T1 sucks, but you know it’s only a moment and you have all the strength and capability you need to manage it. When you find yourself in a deep hole and are able to get out of it with your own means, then everyday problems suddenly feel more manageable.
You can endure because you’ve done it before, you’ve learned it on the road.
That is it. I feel I could write a book about this (should I?), but I’ll stop here for now. The pursuit of only one goal, the marathon, was for me the best way to fix so many things that I’d failed to achieve had I tried to tackle them individually.
Physical strength, diabetes management and insulin sensitivity, a stronger and more resilient mind, a better relationship with food, a better sleep hygiene.
I had a lot of fun doing all that, so much fun that I decided to run more marathons, ultras, and Ironman triathlons. I feel that becoming comfortable managing type 1 diabetes and all the stress and challenges that these goals, these ecological goals, bring truly makes me a better human.
What is your marathon?
