Training with type 1 diabetes

slowoldman

Hi, I'am entered for my first sportive later in the year and was wondering if anyone knows anything about specific training programes for type 1 diabetics, thanks.

johncp

Your training itself won't be very much different to anyone elses - you "just" need to get used to managing your sugar levels while undergoing hard exercise! Have a google for diabetes cycling and there's a thread from this site comes out near the top as does www.runsweet.com which has a load of info on exercising with diabetes

team47b

What are you doing now, how often, how far etc?

What distance/hills on the sportive you are looking at?

How are you doing at the moment with balancing exercise with carbs and insulin, HBA1c?

Are you hypo unaware?

Probably some other questions needed to help you but that will do for now, we all have different ways of putting diabetes in its place but some ideas will be relevant to all

legendary27

slowoldman wrote:

Hi, I'am entered for my first sportive later in the year and was wondering if anyone knows anything about specific training programes for type 1 diabetics, thanks.

There was a thread fairly recently that discussed some of this and offered some useful advice :

viewtopic.php?f=40011&t=12770566&p=17351403&hilit=diabetes#p17351403

One of the difficulties in offering advice is that diabetes management is highly individual and as such, means that you need to work out what suits you best - apologies for stating the obvious.

That said, I would suggest that in principle, you use the same training plan as a non-diabetic and manage your insulin accordingly. It would also make sense to run this past the healthcare professional who helps you manage your diabetes.

Have you attended a DAFNE course ? If you have not, I would deem that extremely beneficial in providing you with the tools to help you manage your diabetes whilst exercising. If you have, I would suggest that you monitor yourself closely whilst undertaking an exercise program and adjust your background and quick-acting insulin as required. The caveat as always being that you should ideally not cycle alone whilst getting used to the training and corresponding insulin adjusting, and that you should always take your tester and more quick-acting carbs than you think you will need ! Again, apologies for stating the obvious.

Good luck with the training program !

Regards,
Gordon

mellow velo

Hi, i have type 1 diabetes (for about 28 years now) taking insulin 4 times daily and also a keen cyclist. As previously mentioned, management is individual but i will share some info about how i manage which might help.

Whenever i go cycling no matter how long or short i always test blood sugar, unless results are particularly high i will eat something like a couple of biscuits that seems to counteract the sugar burning from exercise. This is fine for me for anything up to 1 hour of hard turbo training.

If im on a longish road ride or sportive then thats a different story as the longer i ride the sugar burning gets progressive and what i need to do is frequently consume carbohydrate throughout ride just to keep sugars from dropping to danger levels.

I do this firstly by only having a smaller amount of insulin for the meal before, if its an early morning ride then for breakfast i would just have 2 or 3 units instead instead of the 4 units of insulin i would normally have . Secondly i have the electrolite type powder mixed in water bottle, i think there is about 50-70g of carbohydrate per made up bottle (i have 2 bottles if its a particularly long distance), and i keep taking sips of this frequently throughout ride. I also carry with me something like a flap jack and eat that at a suitable stop/feedstation halfway. I also take with me a half bag of jelly babies, these bad boys are loaded with carbs for their size, i eat a few periodically along the way but are also good backup if you start getting hypo.

Another thing i should mention is, for me anyway, if i ride anything longer than 50 miles, after i have finished the ride and get home my sugars still continue to slowly drop throughout the rest of the day and very often i have not needed to take insulin or a very small amount with my dinner and sometimes even my evening meal. I closely monitor blood sugar right up to going to bed at what point they have usually normalised.

I always find it incredible how much carbohydrates i have to consume to maintain sugars for a longish sportive, along with electrolite powder mix, flapjack, jelly babies it adds up to well over 130g of carb. Always take more carbs than what you think you will need, i would dread to get hypo and not have anything to boost me back up. On top of what i mentioned before i usually take a pack of dextrose.

Luckily i have not had a hypo during a sportive so far and i think this is due to regularly consuming smalls amounts of carbs throughout ride to balance out the burning of sugars.

slowoldman

Thanks for the advice guys, I was wondering about insulin whilst training/riding as I find that even when blood sugars are good, after about 40-50 miles my energy drops somewhat.