Shedd Park Cyclocross Report

photo by someone in the J. White clan, maybe
 Jamie he was done well before me!

So the guys on the team decided that for this weeks race we should all ride in the same category so we could represent! Jamie, Glen, David, Rob and I all lined up in our black Racer-X jerseys and shivered until the race promoter blew the whistle. High temps for the day were scheduled for 39 degrees, but it was more like 34 when we started at 9:45am! It was chilly but managed to bundle up enough to stay warm until I got in a couple mile pre-ride and a warm up lap on the course.

This was my first race in a while (about a month) and my first on the new Omnipod insulin pump, and Dexcom CGM (continuous glucose monitor). I had in stalled my pod last night on my left under arm
where there is some fatty tissue. It was AWESOME to leave the PDM (personal Diabetes Manager, its a hand held control unit for the pod) in the car, and ride tubless! Most of the mountain bikers are saying, "huh, like dude... why would you not ride tubeless dude? Whoa...", but I am talking about the tubing that existed on my last insulin pump system. The pod that is now on my arm contains the insulin and electronics, and the PDM controls it. The pod will remmeber all my basal rates and other settings even if it is not near the PDM. This was great, the only thing I need to do different is to put some Coban tape around my pod and arm. It was shaking around quite a bit on the bumpy sections and was uncomfortable. All was good with my new CGM, results very accurate!

I hadn't been on the bike in while but NEEDED to do this race, and need to do as many more as I can this season. I have been working a lot, and not exercising nearly enough, and the races help motivate me. I can't say I had a great race as far as results, but I had very good blood sugar control.

I woke up with a 160 mg/dl, ate a Cliff Crunch and bolused in full for it. An hour and a half before my race start I set a temp basal of 55% for 2 hours. If my calculations were correct, this would have my pod switch to my normal basal rate with about 10-15 minutes worth of racing remaining. A cyclocross race is typically 40 or 45 minutes for my age/category. Race start 9:45am, race end 10:30am(ish). At 9:30am, after doing about 20 minutes of warm up I noticed the trend arrow on my CGM pointing downward which means my blood sugar is dropping at a rate of 2mg/dl per minute.  Even though my blood sugar is hovering around 200mg/dl (a little high, 160 race start is perfect for me) I didn't want to start a cyclocross race with dropping sugar, so I ate another Cliff Mini (22 grams carb). It looks to have worked out perfect... as far as blood sugar anyway! Never got low even post race, and I never did a post race bolus to prevent the typical blood sugar spike that happens due to the reduced basal rate at the very end of the race. This is why I programmed my pod to start giving me my normal (not reduced) basal rate with about 15 minutes left to race. It seems to have worked for today, but it was a bit of a gamble and I will need more testing. Good thing there are 2 races next weekend!

The Cat 1-4 race was very fast compared to the Cat 4 races i have done before. But then again I had to race against people like Jamie and Glenn (both who lapped me) as well as other super fit freaks! It was fun, but I think I will stick with the Cat 4 category in the future.