October 28, 2010

Ride Hours: 00:38

Insulin Delivery Summary:
Daily Total: 47.96 units
Meal: 12.75u
Corr: 7.80u
Basal: 27.41u

 Daily Carb Intake Bolused For: 191g

Although I went to the work today like any other normal Thursday, today had a heightened sense of purpose.  As part of a master's level thesis research project, at 9am today I took what I consider to be the official first steps towards completing a monumental undertaking.  Much more details on that topic in the upcoming days and weeks... :)

Today focused on the start of 5 days as a "subject" to scientifically analyze how my body responses when competing in an endurance mountain bike event.  The thesis involves me recording everything I eat, my BG levels, and my insulin usage for 5 days, while adding a human performance lab test tonight (measuring sustained max wattage, LT, max HR, substrate usage, VO2, etc), and cumulating with a 12 hour mtb race simulation while monitoring all of these factors combined with speed, cadence, glycogen levels, power, etc.  The end result will be a complete picture of what, were, how, why, and when my body operates.

Cool eh?  :)

Chris Newport from Endurance NEWtrition  is leading this effort, and after work I headed over to her "lair" at the Meredith Human Performance Lab to do the baseline data collection.


After getting setup, and signing a bunch of papers, Chris manned the controls and told me to get to it.


The bike is setup on a CompuTrainer, with the wattage set to 100. Every two minutes the wattage is increased by 40 watts, and the test ends when the legs will simply not turn anymore.  (Nice huh)?  During this time the equipment (and the blood sample taken via ear pricks) measure how much work the "subject" is doing.   The whole process doesn't take long, and I was only spinning the legs for a total of 38 minutes or so.


I always get nervous before these tests, as you just never know what it is going to show.  PLUS I feel an unbelievable amount of pressure to "perform".  About the same as race day actually.  As usual I walked away pretty pleased with some of the data, but completely wrecked by other parts of it.

Nothing you can do but try to keep your chin up and move on to work on your weak spots.  This one is a big bummer though.  Huge bummer.  I've got some work to do...

In any case we all went to eat afterwards, and talked about some of the details for the 12 hour race sim this weekend.  I am WAY looking forward to that, as it feels more natural to me.  :)

Tomorrow is going to be busy as I prepare for Saturday (normal race equipment and nutrition requirements), and have a meeting with Amanda from the Raleigh American Diabetes Association office about some events for November's National Diabetes Month.

Thanks Chris for taking such an interest in diabetes and how it related to endurance performance nutrition.  I have been learning a TON and can't wait to see how this turns out.  :)