We're All Cut From the Same Cloth

As we prepare for the One Drop Caicos Adventure in June 2017, we are doing a ton of training. These training diaries are stories from the field and things I have learned from my time in training.

This past week, I finally got to meet Kati Long in person. Kati will be joining me this June on our One Drop Caicos Adventure. She had a few days off and thought a trip to San Diego might be the exact thing she needed after a month of non-stop work. We met up at the lagoon and went out for an afternoon paddle.

One of the strangest parts of doing these adventure year after year, is that I am essentially going on a week-long adventure with total strangers. When people apply each year they are completely unknown to me.

Sure, I interview them and ask tons of questions and we spend a good part of the year chatting over email and in our Facebook group, but, in all reality, they are an unproven commodity.

Traveling with people you know well can be hard if they are not a good fit. But traveling with strangers under a very stressful adventure is a total crapshoot.

But each time I do this it turns out fantastic. And I think one of the reasons is that a person crazy enough to take on 120 miles of paddling, swimming, hiking, and cycling is probably just the kind of person I want to hang out with.

Our paddle that afternoon went great. Kati was laid back and easy to talk with. We did a big lap around the lagoon talking of our training and about paddling form and, of course, about diabetes.

Sometimes I can have a hard time chatting with people I just met. I am so bad with small talk. But, just like so many of you have experienced when finally meeting a diabetes pal, the instant connection is there.

We have so much in common battling a common enemy. It is so great to chat with someone who gets it. And it is so interesting to me to find out the different ways in which we each battle our common foe.

From the pump, shots, or untethered regimen to how you deal with insurance to the side effects of insulin, there is always something to learn from every diabetes buddy I meet.

We grabbed dinner after our paddle, sitting in the late afternoon sun with a bowl of rice and beans and chatted about what it will be like in the islands (and how amazing a short paddle will bring down a day of blood sugars in the 200's).

Just talking about it with Kati made it so real and exciting. This trip went from some wild dream I had to a concrete plan. And in eight short weeks it will be a reality.

I can’t wait to spend those long, sunny, tiring days with Kati and Erika adventuring and boding over our diabetes and helping each other learn how to better take care of our diabetes under extreme conditions.

The Importance of Good Form, Training Diaries One Drop Caicos

As we prepare for the One Drop Caicos Adventure in June 2017, we are doing a ton of training. These training diaries are stories from the field and things I have learned from my time in training.

I sometimes get asked, “What do you think about for all those hours you are training?”

Between now and when I take off for Turks and Caicos, I will spend roughly two hundred hours staring at the bottom of a pool, or the cliffs on the side of the lagoon where I paddle, or the road that stretches out before me on my bike. At times that will be four or five hours alone with my thoughts.

Most of the time, there are two things that I think about: the details of my adventure and maintaining good form.

I love to think about how amazing it will be to glide along the crystal blue waters as I search for sharks and rays below. Or how satisfied I will feel as I lay down under the stars to go to sleep that first night after paddling twenty-five miles in another country.

Or how totally worked I will feel when we are finished and have one extra day to lay in the sun and recover from 120 miles in four days.

The other thing I think about is good form. When I began training for my 100-mile paddle in 2015, I knew that in endurance sports one of the biggest dangers is overuse injuries. Because we are doing the same movement over and over for sometimes hundreds of hours, the muscles and ligaments in our bodies can get overworked and not be able to repair themselves.

But good form can often prevent these injuries. Usually good form means that the stress of paddling or pulling myself through the water while swimming will be placed on bigger muscles that can handle the load. With paddling that means paddling with your core instead of with your shoulders.

This couldn’t be more apparent than on day two of my Intracoastal Waterway paddle. I had spent a good deal of my time training focusing on correct paddle form, but I hadn’t done a good enough job in relaying that information to my teammates.

So on day two, the girls who had been paddling with their arms were sore and hurting. Those of us paddling using mostly our core muscles felt a little tired, but ready to take on the day. And things only got worse as the days passed.

This year, I am trying to remedy that problem by spending more time talking about form with the team. We are studying videos, doing form drills, and I am sounding like a broken record when it comes to the importance of good form. But I know it will all pay off when on day two, we are all strong and feeling good enough to conquer the second half of our fifty-mile paddle.

So Easy, I Actually WANT to Record Stuff

This is Part Two of a three-part review of the most amazing One Drop diabetes phone app and will focus on meds and activity. Part one focused on Blood Sugar data analysis.

YOUR REGULAR MEDS

Besides it’s strength in number crunching, the One Drop app excels at recording all of the other aspects of diabetes and a few non-diabetes things as well. There are so many things in diabetes that change from day to day, but there are others that stay the same day in and day out. I don’t want to have to record those things over and over.

With the One Drop app I don’t have to. I set them up once and don’t have to remember again. I can enter my pump’s basal rates once and it will automatically record them. Under the Settings tab, click on Medications and Automations. Then set up the pump’s basal rates by typing in each rate. It shows an amazing graph of your basal profile. If you do a temporary basal rate, you can adjust that on the Home page as well.

This Medications and Automation is also a good place to enter any basal insulin that you take everyday. I use Levemir basal in a pen as well as an insulin pump, so I have it set up to automate my morning and evening dose. Then when I turn on the app it will let me check off if I have taken the doses. I can also change the doses if I change my basal shot, say, after a huge workout.

You can even enter non-diabetes meds in this screen. I have my thyroid meds here.

IRREGULAR MEDS

If there are meds that you take that aren’t on any schedule, like boluses or an inhaler, you can record when you take them using the meds drop on the home screen. You get to indicate dose, time, and which medication. You also can make notes, a picture, or note how you are feeling on a sliding scale. Adding tags will make it easier to search for this entry later.

I have used this to track how often I have to use an asthma inhaler and even to record if I have to take Migraine meds. It is a great tool to have for when your doctor asks how often these things happen or to see if they are getting better or worse.

ACTIVITY

I also have been using the app to record my workouts. Every time I finish a workout I get to record how long and intense it was. There’s a place for a picture and notes. It will also suck in data from your activity monitor like a Garmin watch.

It’s nice to be able to scroll through my days and see the huge orange spots that show me that I kicked butt that day. And it makes it very easy to see how my sugars stay very stable if I’ve worked out recently and how they tend to creep up if it’s been a few days since I have had a decent workout.

And it makes it easy to brag online about my workouts. Just hitting the share button let’s me create a quick post to tell the world about my workout so they can celebrate my successes along side me.

It also tracks my daily activity from my iHealth app. So I can tell at a glance if I have had a more active day and how that has affected my sugars.

The ease with which all of this data entry happens makes me want to keep up with my records, which is something I have never really been good at with diabetes.