Yesterday was the perfect day to be a duck, but not so perfect to be a runner. I was freaking soaked, from head-to-toe soaked, sopping wet soaked, weighed 20 extra pounds soaked, and oh man a shivering cold, couldn’t get my internal thermostat back up to a balmy room temperature for hours after cold. But it was worth it!
Instead of running my long run today, I ran it yesterday so I could go and watch a group of my running peeps race the First Half in Vancouver (more on that tomorrow). And so I got up super early on Saturday, had breakfast, and walked to the Skytrain en route to the Seawall. It wasn’t really raining at that point, just a couple of random drops here and there that felt more like sleet than rain. But when the Skytrain dropped me off at Waterfront station it was pouring, like tub fulls of gushing water, one after the other, coming down on my head. But I knew once I started running, it would be okay, and it was. Sure I was getting wet, and the hat on my head was so soaked it kept dipping down over my eyes giving me a bit of tunnel vision, and my jacket (which was not the rain specific jacket) was so sopping wet, it was spewing out a shower of water with each swing of my arms, and my shoes were so full of puddles it was as though I was running through a pool, but I wasn’t cold, nope, the running made sure of that.
However, when the 13 kms were complete, then I was cold. I had misjudged my warm-up walk which caused me to be a good 2 to 3 km away from the Skytrain station I had hoped my run would end at, and so I started walking towards another station, which I knew was nearby, and which I had walked to umpteen times before from the very same location, and yet, I somehow got myself lost and ended up way OFF course, before finally pulling out my iPhone maps to reroute me to another Skytrain station. I’m pretty sure I had been walking – in the still pouring rain – for a good 20 minutes after finishing my run. (Had I brought my debit card, I very likely would have gone into one of the shops and bought a nice, new, warm, DRY outfit!)
And when I walked onto the Skytrain, I swear people – all those with damn umbrellas! – were staring at me with pity in their eyes. I was dripping. I was shivering. And my hands, oh my poor hands, were so cold, they were white from no blood circulating in them (try drawing blood from fingers like that = not possible!) and so sore, I couldn’t even press the buttons on the ticket dispensers without wincing!
What do you do to warm up after a nasty cold/wet run?
YESTERDAY’S RUN:
- 10 a.m. BG before: 14.0
- Temp basal: -50 per cent
- Distance 13 km (lsd)
- Average pace: 6:33 min/km (way faster than I should have been going!)
- Average heart rate: 163 bpm
- Time: 125:15
- @45 minutes: Espresso GU gel (blech!)
- 12 p.m. BG after: 8.7
So I somewhat failed on all accounts with my blood sugars on Friday night and Saturday morning despite my post-run reading being not too, too bad. Friday I rode the trainer for 45 minutes after dinner, and experimented with my dinner bolus by cutting the dose in half from what the bolus wizard on my pump was telling me to do based on the carbs I was eating. I also cut my basal rate down by 80 per cent for an hour beforehand and during the ride. And theoretically it worked. My blood sugars didn’t go low on the ride, something I’ve been trying to achieve since starting on the trainer. I ended with them at 8.0 (I had started at 5.7) but later in the evening they were up to 13.1, despite a BG correction I had administered. So when I woke up in the morning they were 11.4, which is higher than I like them before breakfast, especially before a long-run breakfast, and so I was somewhat unsure of how to calculate my bolus. This is what I did:
LONG-RUN BREAKFAST:
- BG before: 11.4
- Temp basal: -50 per cent
- Raison toast: 42g
- Peanut butter: 0g
- 1/2 banana: 11g
- Smoothie: 15g
- Total carbs: 68g
- BG correction: the wizard suggested I administer 1:55 units, but I did not.
- Total bolus: 3.75 units
As you can see with the BG I started the run out with, it wasn’t exactly perfection. Had my blood sugars been between 10.0 and 12.0 before the run, it could very well have been perfection. The experiments continue…