Another marathon down(my third)! And a new personal record! My time of 3:47 at the Philadelphia Marathon was a two minute improvement.
This race is an important point in my 2012 Quantified Self project. In order to best learn from the day, I carried a total of 8 devices with me: an insulin pump, 2 continuous glucose monitors (CGM) (a Dexcom 7 and my newly arrived Dexcom Gen4), a standard blood glucose monitor, a Garmin heart race monitor chest strap and GPS watch, an iPhone, Nike FuelBand and FitBit. I’ll talk more about these later.
As for my diabetes, managing my blood sugars on the day of the race turned out to be more of a challenge than I was hoping for. During my two previous marathons, I saw my blood sugars spike in the hours before the race, both from being anxious and from how i managed my meal dosages. I was determined to prevent that from happening again this year. I had a normal breakfast (an english muffin with almond butter and a banana) very early in the morning at 5am in order to get to the start line on time. I took a dose of insulin that I would normally take assuming I wasn’t about to exercise. I then had another half of an english muffin at 6am. I took a smaller dose for this, hoping that my blood sugars would start going up a bit closer to the 7am start time (they had been at about 145). I also began a temp basal rate at 6am, setting it to 20% my normal rate for 3 1/2 hours.
Waiting for the start along with Ann, my friend and running companion. We ran the Paris Marathon together back in 2010.
