Wednesday, June 24, 2009

IOB - How I Haven't Missed You

An increased training load brings all the old blood sugar demons with it, no ticket required. When I was on my own hodge-podge training plan I didn't have to try and squeeze in a workout, if life happened, life happened and I'd just as happily skip a workout as I would ride my bike for hours on end with no real goal in mind. However, now that I'm training under Coach E, there is no way I'm going to skip workouts just because life got in the way. I'm coachable to a fault which makes me something like Pavlov's dog but we'll leave that to another time.

Yesterday, Kim was home sick so when I got home from the internship I decided to help finish cleaning the apartment. We finally received our Rubbermaid Fast-Track storage system and both of us wanted to put it up right away to finally get some space in the "spare room". By the time we finished it was 7:15 pm and neither of us had eaten yet.

I woke up at 5:30 yesterday to get my swim workout in, but throughout the day my blood sugar remained somewhat high. At 7:15 after a couple extra units of insulin my bs was still in the 190s, I needed to take some insulin in for our left over Chinese food before my hour and 45 minute bike ride but also knew I didn't want too much IOB to create a low during exercise. With that I gave myself 3.5 units of insulin for what I assumed was a 100 to 120 gram carbohydrate meal.

At 8:30 I jumped on the trainer for a killer workout that Coach E prescribed. 40 minutes into the ride I started to feel sapped of some leg power and decided to test. When I saw a bs of 90 I knew my workouts were done for the night - just too much IOB to recover from that safely. 25 minutes later my blood sugar had rebounded to just 100, and an hour after that i dropped to 71. I made the right call jumping off the trainer but it reminds me of how exact I need to be to complete all my workouts - looks like I might be moving towards a year of chicken sausage and brown rice!

2 comments:

Anne Findlay said...

what I would probably do is just have a snack, push the workout earlier, and save the meal until the workout is over. Of course, that is tough to do when you are really hungry. I also use the bolus calculator, setting the target BG at 180 and increasing the carb ratio to something I see during exercise.

PJ said...

I agree with Anne on this one. It's not exactly fun to workout when hungry but think of how much you get to eat when you're done. ;) Lately I've been having to eat around 9:00 p.m. to get my workouts in. Blah.

P.S. Awesome news about the IM!